The Erotic Life of Racism The Erotic Life of Racism

"Sharon Patricia Holland's brilliant, provocative study challenges cultural theory by galvanizing a bold new conversation about the too-familiar realities of racism as manifested through everyday 'erotic' attachments, capaciously defined. As the book pointedly tracks the personal, bodily, familial, generational, institutional, and symbolic vectors of desire as implicated in racist ways of being, it brings into refocus a range of concerns - biology, touch, hate and love speech, blood relations, the forbidden, violence, miscegenation, liberal guilt and blame - that powerfully address the persistent pull of racism's ordinariness in a culture that ostensibly desires to move beyond race. This is next-wave feminism, queer studies, and race theory at its best." Marlon B. Ross, author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era "In The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Patricia Holland investigates the relation between the erotic and race in cultural theory. The objective of the book is both to counter the prevalent 'post racial' ethos of contemporary American society by showing the continued relevance of the black/white binery, and to investigate various couplings and de-couplings of race and sexuality in the academy." - Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 36, Issue 2, 2013