Friday, 20 June 2025, 2.30-3.30PM at Freie Universität Berlin, Institute for English Language and Literature. Click here for more information.

Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani will give a Keynote on “Queer Aesthetics of Unbelonging: Masculinit, Race and Negative Affects in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” at the “Men on the Margins: Postcolonial and Decolonial Masculinities in Anglophone Literatures” Conference at FU Berlin.

Abstract

The ever-recurring discourse on the “crisis of masculinity” is often understood as a crisis of the unmarked normativity and assumed universality of white masculinity. In my earlier work, I have described this as “the privilege of crisis”. In the 1990s and early 2000s, writers like Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith have challenged this notion, often employing humorous tonalities to depict a broader spectrum of racialised masculinities in contemporary Britain. More recently, there have been much more sombre depictions of “men on the margins.” In the US, it is the upheavals around the Black Lives Matter movement but also increasing anti-migrant sentiments that have shaped the climate during the first and now second Trump presidency and continue in the worrying global rise of the New Right. While there is a greater awareness of racial discrimination, racism is frequently only addressed in its most spectacular violent expressions. Yet, this is not necessarily the most common affective experience of Othering that Black and diasporic subjects make. Adapting Raymond Williams’ famous dictum that “culture is ordinary” as “racism is ordinary” in my contribution, I will focus on two works by queer writers of colour from the US whose novels depict the affective toll that racism takes on the lives of their gay protagonists. To highlight that racism is ordinary, is not to belittle its effects. Part of social marginalisation is the continuous unacknowledgeability of racism that does not simply affect everyone in the same way and yet is something banal, something mundane for so many. Both Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020) can be read as literary responses to this unacknowledgeability. Both authors address negative affects that include shame and abjection that stem from the intersectional experiences of racism and anti-queerness – which in turn shape any understanding of masculinity. While Taylor’s book can be read as an almost clinical dissection of white microaggressions, Vuong seeks beauty in the fleetingness of existence. Despite embracing these entirely different tonalities, both novels contribute to what I would describe as an aesthetics of unbelonging that shapes queer of colour literary explorations of masculinity.