What is it about?
Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké’s work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké’s oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Why is it important?
In the early twentieth century, Grimké wrote with obsessive repetition on themes of lynching and anti-black violence and discrimination. However, she was also a closeted lesbian of color. As a Black lesbian, Grimké’s body existed beyond cultural comprehension, systematically “jettisoned” from the consciousness of both Black and white communities. Throughout her oeuvre, she gave literary form to this jettisoning, sometimes through absence. Despite its psychological futility, the phobic practice of “jettisoning” persists unabated today, as white, heteronormative society continues to cast out as unfit for citizenship and belonging Black and LGBTQ+ people living in the U.S. in 2022.
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This page is a summary of: “Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké, Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies, January 2021, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2021.0005.
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