Book Reviews

Abstract

As Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital capaciously acknowledges, Black sexuality studies is an established and proliferating inter-and transdisciplinary intellectual focus. The framework is central to the understanding that Black sexuality has historically been constructed, in an American context, as pathological and as a site of sexual panic. This insight has influenced and evolved traditional disciplines, fields, and departments, including Black studies. Where this anthology distinguishes itself is through its focus on the inextricable link between Black sexuality and the political and socioeconomic forces that regulate and discipline it. More specifically, the collection considers “the enduring link between capitalism and market and imagination and culture in its theories of black sexualities in ways that traditional scholarship on sexuality and race have refused or sublimated for the work of politics” (2–3). Some of the anthology’s essays adhere to labor and market analysis of Black sexualities in and under advanced capitalism more explicitly than others. Regardless of how clearly the essays coalesce around a shared conceptual preoccupation, all the topics explored are indeed challenging to status-quo politics. This is difficult work, which is one of the reasons why a Black feminist praxis of collaboration is so necessary. The collection, which identifies itself as a “critical race feminist project,” grew from workshops and a culminating 2013 conference organized by the Black Sexual Economies (BSE) Collective, a working group of eight scholars from seven US research institutions in the fields of law; African American and African diaspora studies; English; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; film and media studies; history; American Studies; and the performing arts (1). These scholars—who met regularly on the Washington University campus for four years (from 2010 to 2013)—include project organizer and co-convener Adrienne D. Davis; co-convener Mireille MillerYoung; Marlon Bailey; Matt Richardson; Jeffrey McCune; Felice Blake; Xavier Livermon; and L.H. Stallings. The BSE Collective’s intention was to “serve as an incubator for the crafting of new paradigms for thinking about race, gender, sexuality, and class and the use of innovative interdisciplinary methodologies” (ix). The resulting collection