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Single : arguments for the uncoupled
\" Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:\"Table Normal\"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:\"; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:\"Times New Roman\";} What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyonce;'s \"Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),\" and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Racial Blasphemies
Racial Blasphemies , using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words - that furiously communicates not theology or spirituality as much as it signals the sheer difficulty of representing race in a non-racist manner on the literary page.
Michael L. Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays on race, sexuality, and literature have appeared in Callaloo , GLQ , and the University of Toronto Quarterly .
eBook
Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance's Impolite Queers
Cobb plots the way in which acts of rudeness bring into sharp relief race criticism's sexuality amnesia. The formal possibilities for a black queer literary aesthetic are discussed as well.
Journal Article
Irreverent Authority: Religious Apostrophe and the Fiction of Blackness in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones
In Brown Girl, Brownstones, religious apostrophes equip Paule Marshall's characters with the ability to represent their bodies as racialized bodies asking difficult questions, with the ability to make their 'fact of blackness' more like an open and less-weighty 'fiction of blackness.' Cobb demonstrates the manner in which these religious apostrophes help the novel's female agents come clean.
Journal Article
Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children
The queer child thus tells me something that is no longer a secret: despite those who've been whispering in my ear that queer theory is dead, repetitive, or even \"over,\" queer theory, it seems, is nonetheless alive and kicking, which is lucky for us, because \"now more than ever,\" queers need critical, intellectually daring, and politically minded work to compete with the conservative family values (especially the value of straight, innocent children) that not only grounds the U.S. nation, but soon will apparently ground the rest of the world. Kidd tracks this lively American obsession with the development and significance of boys by focusing on feral tales, a generic name he coins in order to suggest a resemblance between the literary fairy tale and a group of narratives that might not otherwise be intelligible as a genre.
Book Review
Painfully Obvious: Nakedness and Religious Words in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain
And the darkness of John's sin was like the darkness of the church on
Saturday evenings; like the silence of the church while he was there alone,
sweeping, and running water into the great bucket, and overturning
chairs, long before the saints arrived. It was like his thoughts as he moved
about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle that
he hated, yet loved and feared. It was like Roy's [his brother's] curses,
Roy ... cursing in the house of God, and making obscene gestures before the eyes of]esus. It was like all this, the walls which testified that the
wages of sin was death. (19)In the following pages, then, I question African American criticism's reliance on historical readings of the black church. In contrast, I articulate that
Baldwin's relationship to religious words is primarily lexical, and not historical.
I then showcase the pitfalls of the traumatic model of historical and painful
racial affiliation inhering within the evangelical conversion experience that
John, despite his active resistance, has no choice but to repeat. Finally, in the last
section, I focus on the blasphemous results of]ohn's own eventual acceptance of
the Lord's Word: John learns to repeat his community's religious text, his community's description of the black flesh, but his inflection, with its resisting insight, makes all the difference for John's continued and thriving existence within
a community sinfully organized around the power of religious language.
Book Chapter
She was Something Vulgar in a Holy Place\: The Resanguination of the Word in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones
By skin color, by African origin, by their colonized status, the West Indians
of Paule Marshall's novel are inexorably connected to all black Americans,
but it is their distinctiveness that yields the peculiar themes and images of
the novel. The Boyce family does not belong to the tradition that created
such American novels as Richard Wright's Black Boy or Gwendolyn
Brooks' Maud Martha or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. These transplanted Barbadians ate employed, literate, ambitious, property-owning,
upwardly mobile, tough community of first-generation immigrants. Not
one person in this novel is unemployed. These people came to \"this man
country,\" as they call it, on purpose, as willfully as many white immigrants;
and they exercise their collective force to get what they want. 3Silla, similarly, must scrub her way through the dirt of racist stereotyping, and appeal-\"Oh Lord\"-to greater linguistic powers. She arduously
apostrophizes an otherwise inarticulate complaint about black female differences. Silla engages in a form of critical speaking advocated by Spillers, who
notes, albeit in a different context (and makes no mention of religion), the
sheer difficulty of speaking that must be confronted and resisted \"in order to
speak a truer word concerning\" the black feminist self 14 Religious apostrophes equip Marshall's characters with the ability to represent their bodies as
racialized bodies asking difficult questions, with the ability to make their \"fact
of blackness\" more like an open and less-weighty \"fiction of blackness.\" The
pages that follow will demonstrate the manner in which these religious apostrophes help the novel's female agents to come clean.
Book Chapter
Introduction
No matter how nonmimetic, experimental, subversive, or avant-garde
such diasporic writing might try to be, it is invariably classified, marketed, and received in the West as Chinese, in a presupposed correspondence to that reality called China. As in the case of representations by all
minorities in the West, a kind of paternalistic, if not downright racist, attitude persists as a method of categorizing minority discourse: minorities
are allowed the right to speak only on the implicit expectation that they
will speak in the documentary mode, \"reflecting\" the group from which
they come?
Book Chapter
Actual Sacrilege\: The Blasphemous Narration of Time and Race in William Faulkner's Light in August
Soon after Christmas has blasphemed the black church, his search party
discovers a \"scrap of paper\" wedged into a \"split plank on the edge of the
church\" (326). This scrap serves as a sustained comment on his criminal and
irreverent behavior. Although unsigned, ostensibly the note, which is addressed to the sheriff, was written by Joe Christmas' \"unpractised hand\"
(326). The scrap comes from a cigarette container with a \"white inner side\"Moreover, the precise \"nature\" of Joe's criminality will be decided once
Joe's body is incarcerated and made legible as racially coherent through the unofficial, quasi-juridical lynching technologies the community wants to read and
place Joe's recalcitrant body as black. Joe's mediated voice knows as much,
\"They all want me to be captured, and then when I come up ready to say Here
I am\" (337). The deliberate allusion to the biblical narrative of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, \"Here I am,\"35 puts the capture, the lynching,Gavin Stevens, in his brief appearance, describes such a logic of racial
recognitions that subtend the religiously inflected sacrifice Christmas cannot
avoid. Stevens narrates Joe's racial ambiguity to his professor friend. In direct
address Stevens explains:And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all
reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in
a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the
moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final
moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his
hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him up into that
ecstasy out of the black jungle where life has already ceased before the
heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood
failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the
minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched
behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had
been defYing it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned
table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand. (449).
Book Chapter
Arresting Whiteness: Religious History and \Local\ Color in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
Chapter Two
Book Chapter