title: On the transgressiveness of ambiguity: Richard Bruce Nugent and the flow of sexuality and race.
abstract: The study focuses on the slender corpus of literary work by Harlem Renaissance poet, author and visual artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), arguably America's foremost Black aesthete. As an individualist in the footsteps of post-Hegelian and pre-Nietzschean philosopher Max Stirner (1806-1856), Nugent sought to re-think sexuality and race beyond fixed schemes of categorial distribution. To this end, Nugent deployed a strategy of sexual and racial ambiguity that aimed at situating the uniquely sexed and raced individual within the continuities of ever-diversifying Nature. Nugent's deconstructive approach of sexuality and race proves to be convergent with (but not genealogically dependent on) the universalization of sexual intermediariness and racial miscegenation postulated by German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld during the first third of the twentieth century. Nugent's non-identitarian conception of sex acts anticipated by more than a decade comparable insights propounded by Alfred Kinsey.
authors.affiliation: a Heidelberg , Germany.
authors.forename: J Edgar
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Bauer
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American / Q000266:history* / Q000523:psychology; D049673:History, 20th Century; D063509:Homophobia / Q000208:ethnology; D018451:Homosexuality, Male / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D063505:Racism; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology; D014481:United States
keywords: Blacks and homosexuality; Harlem Renaissance; sexual/racial ambiguity; sexual/racial binaries; sexual/racial fluidity; sexual/racial uniqueness; “New Negro”; “the third”