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Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, by Keguro Macharia

Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, by Keguro Macharia

NYU Press

Regular price $27.00 Sale

In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres―psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry―as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.

PRAISE - from NYU Press website:

"Frottage takes you on a journey of mutual pleasure, queer potentials, intimacy, violence, and erotic freedom through the African and Afro-diaspora. Macharia delivers a layered, intellectually expansive, and necessary critical irritation for black queer studies."
"Frottage is an important and field-changing book. One of Keguro Macharia’s great talents is to guide us to a way to understand, read, and think differently about kinship, about gender, about ‘thinghood,’ and about intimacy. Macharia is a profoundly original thinker and writer and in Frottage he renders and imagines diaspora in ways that attend beautifully to a range of world-making practices, to geo-histories and discontinuities. The final chapter, both meditation and invitation, is a gift."

Sexual Culture Series. Book 11. Released November 19, 2019