Desiring Booty and Killing the Body: Toward “Negative” Erotics

Abstract

As a prelude to a consideration of the Black erotic, I first argue that celebrations of the Black body and of Black sexuality in modernity ought to be tempered by the memory of Black suffering since, for Blacks, it is precisely in their bodies that that memory of pain and suffering is etched.² Yet there is a paradox which recognition of this creates. For is not the body also the site where the erotic, at least in its sexual form, is experienced? If so, it would appear then that there is a fundamental sense in which pain and pleasure are determinative forms of the structure of Black desire. But this means that at the center of representations of the body that I address here (and the sexuality they entail) lie contradictions and ambiguities—whose substance is essentially racial and political—that can only be understood, though not necessarily resolved, in terms of the excesses of the operations of desire as it manifests itself in and through the erotic.