Dreams of an impossible blackness: Racialized desire and America's integrationist impulse, 1945--1955

This literary and cultural study explores the subtle shifts in social understandings of race and sexuality in American literature, emerging out of World War II, and how these changes complicate the more public events of integration in the late 1940s and early 50s. In analyzing the more intimate spaces of region, neighborhood and home, and most intimately in the libidinal urges found in poems, letters, and novels of the period, this dissertation does not focus exclusively on the racial dimension of integration, as many historical accounts have done; rather, it explores how "queer" desire---understood as same-sex and interracial desire---in its more publicly articulated forms, fueled integrationist writing and helped shape its aesthetics. Using archival research, historicist approaches, and contemporary theoretical work on race and sexuality to interrogate the concept of integration, this dissertation examines varied "integrationist impulses" in eight writers from the mid-twentieth century, organized in pairs. The first chapter focuses on Elizabeth Bishop's and Zora Neale Hurston's regional representations of integration in 1940s Florida. Next, the complex racial and sexual subjectivities of the WWII urban landscape, and the influence of integrated artistic communities, are explored in the lives and poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Edwin Denby. Utilizing psychoanalysis and existentialism to illuminate an increasingly interracial society of the 1950s, the third chapter focuses on representations of white perversity in the work of African American novelists Ann Petry and William Demby, locating their novels alongside the era's journalistic discourses on the homosexual as sexual menace. In the final chapter, the trauma of integration and re-imagined identities of whiteness are considered in novels by Jewish writer Jo Sinclair and the nearly forgotten, African American novelist Carl Offord. These unconventional critical couplings spotlight the ways segregationist criticism, whether by race or genre, has obscured important and needed reevaluations of post-WWII America, particularly the convergences of race and sexuality in postwar identities. Investigating integration as both a racial and sexual phenomenon, this project documents the imprint of same-sex desire, interracial sex, and queer configurations of the family on the era's desegregationist politics and its literature.