Delany and Sex at the End of Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

What does it mean to have sex in the midst of societal and environmental collapse? Does sex even have a place in the midst of the devastation wrought by late-stage American empire? These are questions that the work of the writer Samuel R. Delany has spoken to over the decades of his prolific career and life. From his early AIDS novella, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (1984), published as part of his Return to Nevèrÿon series, to the subversive and anti-hierarchical cruising sociality described by him in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), to Delany’s most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), in which a Black gay male utopia is constructed only to call the constraints of utopia into question, Delany’s insistence that “radicalism begins in the body” (2017), offers readers a way to reconcile the erotic with the dystopian.

Much of Delany’s work forces readers to reckon with the limits on knowledge that empire necessitates in order to seize and conquer. In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, an authoritarian Web constructs algorithms of desire and throttles information sharing which estranges people from their history at the same time that it’s meant to produce intimacy with an/other. That novel science fictionalizes much of what Delany proffers up in terms of the worldbuilding potential of public sex in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and The Motion of Light in Water and writes in search of the limit cases of desire in The Einstein Intersection and Trouble on Triton.

If, as Amber Musser and Jennifer Nash argue, queerness and the erotics of desire push back against the empirical in favor of the sensual, our panel will use Delany’s science fiction, memoirs, essays, and interviews as an occasion to think through the place of sex in the reorganization of an America and a world after empire. How do Delany’s subjects (even Delany himself) utilize sex and sexual desire in the face of totalitarian regimes? Following recent work by Kirin Wachter-Grene, we also ask what transgressive function might sexual intimacy fulfill at the center or the margins of a crumbling empire (Wachter-Grene 2015)? And how might we still have sex in the midst of multiple pandemics and climate catastrophe? (Rodriguez 2021) And how do sex and desire undermine received ideas about utopia and dystopia in the history of American literature and philosophy?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• ​​Delany’s Sex Commons - Kirin Wachter-Grene, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Against the Sexless Utopia: Delany contra LeGuin - Smaran Dayal, Stevens Institute of Technology

• Delany’s Runs - Omari Weekes, Queens College, CUNY

• Orphic interludes: On the Mythical Limits of Sex - Peter Hitchcock, CUNY Graduate School and University Center

Chair

• Debarati Biswas, City Tech, CUNY

Biographical Information

Kirin Wachter-Grene is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the guest-editor of two special issues of The Black Scholar: “At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure” (50.2) and “Edgeplay: Black Radical Pleasure II” (53.3/4). Additionally, her academic writing is also published in Social Text, African American Review, Callaloo, Palimpsest, Post45, Feminist Formations, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Her first monograph Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature is forthcoming from Fordham University Press and her second monograph is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Smaran Dayal is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Stevens Institute of Technology, and serves on the Board of Directors of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Afrofutures, Atlantic Pasts: Decolonial Revisions in African American Science Fiction. Dayal is the co-editor, with Ben Baer, of Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2024), and, with Ulrich Baer, of an anthology of American literature, Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (2020). His scholarly work has appeared in the journals American Studies, Interventions, Citizenship Studies, Social Text, and GLQ, among other venues.

Omari Weekes is an assistant professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. His current book project, Lurid Affinities: Sex and the Spirit in Post-Civil Rights Black Literature argues that much black writing of the late 20th century thinks through the dialectic between the sacred and the profane by accounting for a matrix of pre-discursive intensities, attractions, and longings that help to organize the kinds of communities that black people construct for themselves. His writing has been featured in The Black Scholar, The New York Times, n+1, The Nation, Bookforum, and other scholarly and popular venues.

Peter Hitchcock is a professor of English at CUNY. Recent publications include essays on labor and desire, the postcolonial pastoral, the labor of migrant subjectivity, decolonizing aesthetics, and “living the city” (on Samuel R. Delany). Forthcoming books include Seriality and Social Change, and an edited volume on Parasitical Logic.

Debarati Biswas (she/her) is an assistant professor of African American studies and coordinator of the Black Visual Cultures minor at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary Black and U.S. ethnic literatures, queer theory, radical Black feminism, climate fictions, and decolonial thought. Biswas is currently working on her first book monograph about the affective and embodied dimensions of Blackness and queerness in carceral spaces—prisons, inner cities, and single-room-occupancy hotels—in African American men’s literature. She serves on the editorial board of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and is the cochair of the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Her writing appears in Social Text, WSQ, Public Books, and Teen Vogue. Biswas has also coproduced an award-winning docu-fictional webseries, Three Trembling Cities, on immigrants of color in NYC.