Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The verbal or textual criticism has for its object to restore as far as possible the original text of the Greek Testament from the oldest and most trustworthy sources, namely, the uncial manuscripts (especially, the Vatican and Sinaitic), the ante-Nicene versions, and the patristic quotations. In this respect our age has been very successful, with the aid of most important discoveries of ancient manuscripts. By the invaluable labors of Lachmann, who broke the path for the correct theory (Novum Testament. Gr., 1831, large Graeco-Latin edition, 1842–50, 2 vols.), Tischendorf (8th critical ed., 1869–72, 2 vols.), Tregelles (1857, completed 1879), Westcott and Hort (1881, 2 vols.), we have now in the place of the comparatively late and corrupt textus receptus of Erasmus and his followers (Stephens, Beza, and the Elzevirs), which is the basis of au Protestant versions in common use, a much older and purer text, which must henceforth be made the basis of all revised translations. After a severe struggle between the traditional and the progressive schools there is now in this basal department of biblical learning a remarkable degree of harmony among critics. The new text is in fact the older text, and the reformers are in this case the restorers. Far from unsettling the faith in the New Testament, the results have established the substantial integrity of the text, notwithstanding the one hundred and fifty thousand readings which have been gradually gathered from all sources. It is a noteworthy fact that the greatest textual critics of the nineteenth century are believers, not indeed in a mechanical or magical inspiration, which is untenable and not worth defending, but in the divine origin and authority of the canonical writings, which rest on fax stronger grounds than any particular human theory of inspiration. Historical Criticism.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  D AW N I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few balky steps down the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself—though the trees seemed oddly aware of me. Then again, this was Oregon. The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought, gazing around. Calm, green, tranquil—I was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail we’d had to blaze to get here. Since then, things had been pretty tame. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.” Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism—and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive. I’d nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away I’d sometimes think: Jeez, it’s just a dirt road. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I’d recently blazed my own trail—back home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night I’d lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking: This is me? Still? I moved quicker down the road. My breath formed rounded, frosty puffs, swirling into the fog. I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid. Faster, I told myself. Faster. On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full...

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Even as hooks recognizes Sula's unwillingness to accept or capitulate to the social modalities and communal proscriptions ascribed to blacks and women, she asserts that Sula does not constitute radical black female subjectivity, insomuch as Sula, while reveling in "self-assertion and [a] celebration of autonomy," is "we also know [...] not self-actualized enough to stay alive."45 "Her awareness of what it means to be a radical subject does not," hooks purports, "cross the boundaries of public and private; hers is a privatized self-discovery."46 hooks's reader-response critical approach, as well as her characterological assessment of Sula, presents at least two dilemmas. First, whether deliberately or inadvertently, it equates existential or metaphysical notions of living/being with actualization, whereby Sula's dying-or, "inability" to live-is indicative of Sula's lack of self-actualization. What I suggest is that Sula's death in the narrative should not be confounded and read as indicative of a lack of self-actualization, consciousness, or subjectivity. Rather, it reflects more acutely the limited options (especially when Sula was written) for female characters like Sula who challenge racial/sociocommunal boundaries and transgress restrictions, especially those pertaining to female sexuality and marriage, and who ultimately choose a life of "self-discovery" rather than one of racial uplift and conformity. As literary scholar Mary Helen Washington avers, "The demands of racial uplift and racial loyalty" have meant that such characters-those "who do not uphold these ideals"-are invariably characterized with a fate of conformity, expiation for their perceived transgressive behavior, and far worse: death 47 Yet, it also typifies other attributes that death represents, to revert back to Sharon Holland, in that the dead-and I would argue, in this case, also the dying (Sula)-operates "as an embodied entity or subject capable of transgression."48 In Sula's instance, death/dying marks her destiny, and, even in the process of dying, she does so unconventionally and with an unbreakable spirit of autonomy, nonconformity, and subjectivity. She herself, upon her deathbed, revels in the knowledge that she is unlike other black women dying "like a stump" across the nation. "Me," Sula notes, "I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world," a point to which I will return momentarily (143). Second, and of even greater magnitude, hooks asserts that Sula's "self-discovery" is "privatized" and thereby fails to extend beyond public and private boundaries. Given that the personal is political, as many scholars and second-wave feminists have argued convincingly, it is precisely because Sula's personal "indiscretions" and recalcitrant actions are not privatized and are, indeed, exposed and open for public consumption, that her personal transgressions take on a larger sociocommunal and political significance and educe public/ communal responses.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The image of the Angolan woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful. When Black women in this country come together to examine our sources of strength and support, and to recognize our common social, cultural, emotional, and political interests, it is a development which can only contribute to the power of the Black community as a whole. It can certainly never diminish it. For it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advances can be made. The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals. Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond the sphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor the realized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals. Black women and Black men who recognize that the development of their particular strengths and interests does not diminish the other do not need to diffuse their energies fighting for control over each other. We can focus our attentions against the real economic, political, and social forces at the heart of this society which are ripping us and our children and our worlds apart. Increasingly, despite opposition, Black women are coming together to explore and to alter those manifestations of our society which oppress us in different ways from those that oppress Black men. This is no threat to Black men. It is only seen as one by those Black men who choose to embody within themselves those same manifestations of female oppression. For instance, no Black man has ever been forced to bear a child he did not want or could not support. Enforced sterilization and unavailable abortions are tools of oppression against Black women, as is rape. Only to those Black men who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition can the self-actualization and self-protective bonding of Black women be seen as a threatening development. Today, the red herring of lesbian-baiting is being used in the Black community to obscure the true face of racism/sexism. Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  On July 4, 1964, I sold out my first shipment. I wrote to Tiger and ordered nine hundred more. That would cost roughly three thousand dollars, which would wipe out my father’s petty cash, and patience. The Bank of Dad, he said, is now closed. He did agree, grudgingly, to give me a letter of guarantee, which I took down to the First National Bank of Oregon. On the strength of my father’s reputation, and nothing more, the bank approved the loan. My father’s vaunted respectability was finally paying dividends, at least for me. I HAD A venerable partner, a legitimate bank, and a product that was selling itself. I was on a roll. In fact, the shoes sold so well, I decided to hire another salesman. Maybe two. In California. The problem was, how to get to California? I certainly couldn’t afford airfare. And I didn’t have time to drive. So every other weekend I’d load a duffel bag with Tigers, put on my crispest army uniform, and head out to the local air base. Seeing the uniform, the MPs would wave me onto the next military transport to San Francisco or Los Angeles, no questions asked. When I went to Los Angeles I’d save even more money by crashing with Chuck Cale, a friend from Stanford. A good friend. When I’d presented my running-shoe paper to my entrepreneurship class, Cale showed up, for moral support. During one of those Los Angeles weekends I attended a meet at Occidental College. As always, I stood on the infield grass, letting the shoes do their magic. Suddenly a guy sauntered up and held out his hand. Twinkly eyes, handsome face. In fact, very handsome—though also sad. Despite the enameled calm of his expression, there was something sorrowful, almost tragic, around the eyes. Also, something vaguely familiar. “Phil,” he said. “Yes?” I said. “Jeff Johnson,” he said. Of course! Johnson. I’d known him at Stanford. He’d been a runner, a pretty fair miler, and we’d competed against each other at several all-comer meets. And sometimes he’d gone for a run with me and Cale, then for a bite after. “Heya, Jeff,” I said, “what are you up to these days?” “Grad school,” he said, “studying anthro.” The plan was to become a social worker. “No kidding,” I said, arching an eyebrow. Johnson didn’t seem the social worker type. I couldn’t see him counseling drug addicts and placing orphans. Nor did he seem the anthropologist type. I couldn’t imagine him chatting up cannibals in New Guinea, or scouring Anasazi campsites with a toothbrush, sifting through goat dung for pottery shards. But these, he said, were merely his daytime drudgeries. On weekends he was following his heart, selling shoes. “No!” I said. “Adidas,” he said. “Screw Adidas,” I said, “you should work for me, help me sell these new Japanese running shoes.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Face shiny with perspiration, eyes almost demented: wide-blackcentered—the queen removes her hat and passes it along the crowd, collecting money—making comments as she moves still writhing; dishing the women flagrantly, insulting the men with them; calling the lesbians “mister,” the fairies “miss”; camping openly with the masculine hustlers, withdrawing her hat abruptly (“I’ll take it out later in trade, honey”)—subtly choosing those from whom she will demand recognition—and she is carrying it all off Triumphantly: her woman-act so exaggerated, so distorted, so uncompromisingly brutal in its implied judgment, that this crowd, hypnotized by her, momentarily sucked into her immediate world, responds mechanically: As if buying away her scorching-eyed judgment of them, they acknowledge her with the coin dropped into the feathered hat. She approaches us. And she passes the hat before me—withdraws it quickly with a wink and a kiss—and I breathe in relief at having expelled her implied judgment. But she leans over the table, extending the hat toward the man. He doesnt move.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  This portrayal of Paul as a persecutor of the Christian church coincides with what we find in the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts is an account of the lives of the apostles after the ascension of Jesus. Its basic theme is that Christianity spread throughout the Roman world rapidly as the apostles took the message abroad. This spread of Christianity faced certain kinds of hardships along the way, one of which was persecution. We saw that in an earlier lecture, that in some respects, Acts is not a perfectly reliable historical source for us, but nonetheless, it does have historical accounts that do appear to be trustworthy. In this particular case, we have confirmation from what Paul himself said about his being a persecutor of Christians. Paul, by the way, uses two different names. “Paul” is the Greek name; “Saul” is his Hebrew name. In this account, in Acts, chapter 9, he’s going under the name “Saul.” Meanwhile, Saul [chapter 9, verse 1] still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest of Jerusalem, and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found anyone who belonged to the way [That’s the ancient term for Christianity], men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Paul was going off to Damascus in order to find Christians, in order to bring them back to Jerusalem and have them stand trial. Both Paul himself in his letters, then, and the Book of Acts, concede while he was a non-Christian Jew, Paul was persecuting the Christians. Later, after Paul converted to Christianity, he gave an indication that he himself suffered violence at the hands of non-Christian Jews. This is a very interesting passage in Paul’s writing. It is found in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, in which Paul is talking about how it is that he is a chief apostle. He is trying to show that he is a better apostle than others, and the way he tries to show that he is a better apostle than others is by showing that he suffered 122 more than others. The idea is that a real apostle will be like Jesus. Well, what happened to Jesus? He got crucified. Well, if you’re going to be his follower, you too are going to suffer, and if you’re not suffering, then you are obviously not really imitating Christ. Paul wants to show that he imitates Christ better than anyone. Are they [These are Christian opponents of his] ministers of Christ? I’m talking like a madman, [he says]. I am a better one, with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Renay exercises not only her agency, but also her transcendent abilities in that she transgresses Jerome's patriarchal authority. Renay, now unencumbered by Jerome's misogynist and confining mandates or her heterosexist marriage with him, articulates her refusal to leave Terry and return to Jerome and "the dirt." In her "talking back," to borrow bell hooks's terminology, Renay denigrates Jerome in language that reverberates with the nationalist discourse that Jerome embodies in order to illustrate the ways in which he, even by certain nationalist standards, does not meet the requirements for manhood.49 Renay's "back talk" not only demonstrates her unwillingness to be "policed" by Jerome and by nationalist and larger societal circumscriptions for women, but, of far greater import, it signifies her evolution from objectivity to subjectivity-that is, from a largely unautonomous being to an actualized, empowered, liberated self. "Could It Be Met in this Form?": Shockley and the Ideological Subversion of Convention In 1969, just five years prior to the publication of Loving Her, in the San Francisco Times, Marvin Garson-in a move recognizing as well as drawing upon the liberatory politics of the black nationalist call for "Black Power"-makes a similar call: for "Queer Power." Ruminating on the ways in which black people had, through self-determination, appropriation, and self-definition, revitalized the very meaning of "blackness," he uses the (trans)formative power of (racial) self-definition as a model. Once "it was impolite to suggest that a Negro gentleman might have black skin," and "now it's `Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."' Perhaps, "in a few years [...I queers will be saying something like, `Don't keep trying to rise above it-kiss me, darling, I'm queer and I love it. "so This redefinition of what's in a name, particularly governing constructions of "lesbian" identity, is precisely what, in part, Shockley's novel anticipates and problematizes. The nexus of black and queer power, a struggle against a desexualized blackness or a construction of sexuality divorced of race, is precisely what Loving Her achieves decades before any black and/ or queer theoretical postulations. Exploring vis-a-vis literary conventions, transgressive embodiment, and racialized expressions of sexual "difference," Shockley not only anticipates but serves as a foundational apparatus and precursor for (post) modern discourses on black sexuality studies, specifically black queer-or "quare"-studies. As Shockley and the same-gender loving movement illuminate the cultural imperative and intersections of race and sexuality (as an act, behavior, and identity), black queer studies follows in a similar tradition. Simply put, Shockley serves as a predecessor for black queer theorists in her focus on the nexus of race and sexuality as black cultural imperatives. In the spirit of broad inclusivity, and not to perpetuate a sense of communal divisiveness, "black queer" encapsulates "and, in effect, names the specificity of the historical and cultural differences"-that simultaneous dialogic sameness and difference-"that shape the experiences and expressions of `queerness. "51

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me. THERE WAS NO time to unpack. There was no time to get over our post-China jet lag, which was profound. As we returned to Oregon, the process of going public was in full swing. Big choices needed to be made. Especially: who was going to manage the offering. Public offerings don’t always succeed. On the contrary, when mismanaged, they turn into train wrecks. So this was a critical decision right out of the blocks. Chuck, having worked at Kuhn, Loeb, still had strong relationships with their people, and thought they’d be best. We interviewed four or five other firms but in the end decided to go with Chuck’s instincts. He hadn’t steered us wrong yet. Next we had to create a prospectus. It took fifty drafts, at least, to get it looking and sounding the way we wanted.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Nel's experience on the train and her newfound "me-ness" foster her creation of a self, like Sula, outside the confines of girlhood/womanhood, and exclusive of the repressive middle-class Victorian values of her mother and licentious behavior of her grandmother Rochelle Sabat, "a Creole whore" (16). Not only does Nel dissociate herself from the sexual disarray, marked by both agency and vulnerability, but she undergoes, concomitantly, a journey toward her newfound identity: a "me-ness" rooted not in an already fixed state of being but, rather, gained through an existential process marked by catharsis in which her identity (politics) is not only transformed but actualized. Nel's cathartic experiences reverberate with what Deborah McDowell recognizes precisely as the "notion of character as static essence" reinstated "with the idea of character as process. Whereas the former is based on the assumption that the SELF is knowable, centered, and unified," as she further avers, "the latter is based on the assumption that the SELF is multiple, fluid, relational, and in a perpetual state of becoming."22 And so, Nel establishes a "self" incongruous with the diametrically opposing identities of Helene and Rochelle, the apotheosis of propriety and promiscuity, respectively. She enacts her/this incongruity through her cultivation of a friendship with Sula, the embodiment of nonconformity. Sula's and Nel's inventing themselves outside the script and its strictures materializes in "1922" in two consequential correlating events: their masturbatory and homoerotic "grass play" scene and, second, the interlocking tragic interactions with Chicken Little. Both events evidence their disengagement with expectations governing black female behavior through their empowering homosocial relationship, as well as illumine their gestures toward liberation, if even metaphorically, from patriarchy and the regulation of female sexuality. Transpiring near the riverbank, the grass play scene involves Sula and Nel, "without ever meeting each other's eyes," stroking blades of grass "up and down, up and down." Upon taking possession of a "thick twig," Nel removes its bark with her nail, stripping it down to "a smooth, creamy innocence." Sula replicates Nel's move with a twig of her own, before the two begin uprooting grass to make a bare spot, on which to trace "intricate patterns" with their twigs, after which they "poked" them "rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of [the] twig" (58). After "more strenuous digging and [...] rising," the holes grew deeper and larger, and "[t]ogether they worked until the two holes were one and the same."

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Second, for that matter, Christianity, in their opinion, alone, was the true religion. Thus, these apologists actually went on the attack. They attacked paganism for worshipping dead and false idols, so there was this kind of standard polemic against idol worship. “If you worship these idols, they are just stone or wood. They are dead. They are nothing. You can knock them over with your hand. These are your gods? If you have a temple, and your god is in there, and you temple burns down, is your god destroyed? We believe in a God who is not material at all, the one true God.” In fact, they go on, then, and give reasons for thinking that Christianity is the true religion. It is proved to be true by the fact that its followers can do miracles. Throughout these accounts, then, you have references to the apostles of Jesus performing miraculous deeds, as we saw earlier. It is also proven to be true because of “proof from prophecy.” These apologists point out that hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus, there were Jewish prophets who predicted what would happen to Jesus, and what Jesus would do. The prophet Isaiah predicted that the savior would be born of a virgin, and Jesus was. The prophet Micah predicted that the savior would come from Bethlehem, and Jesus did. Isaiah, chapter 53, Psalm 22, predicted that the savior would be crucified, and so he was. 225 Even as far back as the book of Genesis, we have evidence of Christ. God, in the beginning, when he creates humans, says, “Let us make man In our own image.” Who is he talking to? He’s talking to Christ. Christ is found in the book of Genesis. Genesis was written by Moses. This religion is much older than anything the pagans have. Pagan religions might trace themselves back to hundreds of years earlier. You could possibly trace them back to Homer, writing the //iad and the Odyssey, but Moses lived 400 years before Homer did, 800 years before Plato, so that these key figures, for the pagan religions, in fact, are much later than the key figures for the Christian religion, Moses and the prophets.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Still not yet referenced by name but differentiated based on phenotypic characteristics, skin tone and bodily features, Theresa and Lorraine are reduced to a fixation on their bodies and physical attributes that, problematically, does not extend beyond these aesthetic features; yet, on the other hand, they also embody dimension and characteristics that resist their conflation into absolute or singular categories that would relegate them and lesbians, as well as same-gender loving women generally, to undifferentiated types. They are imbued with a desirability and such qualities as that of being aesthetically pleasing-"pretty"-in ways that disrupt stereotypes and false, illusory conflations of lesbians and same-gender loving women as outside the beauty status quo: as ugly and sexually diverse because of their undesirability which, in turn, links with an inability to attract men. Just as Naylor demonstrates the heterogeneity that exists among black women within a specific communal locale, as evidenced by her dramatization of the lives of seven women, so, too, does she rescue black lesbians and same-gender loving women from a homogeneity that would otherwise render them and their experiences monolithic. While both of them love women sexually and emotionally, they differ on both experiential and ideological levels. Lorraine's first lover was a woman while she was in high school, and since then she never had a male lover or sexual encounters with men. Because she possesses knowledge of and conviction about her sexual character and intimate desires for women, when her father found a letter from her high school lover, Lorraine refused to lie about its fundamental meanings. As a result of embracing her sexuality and sexual attraction to women, she is kicked out-in an excommunication from her family-and not even allowed to take anything beyond the clothes on her back. Even in her conviction, she has a complex relationship to the designation "lesbian" and what it entails; her very existence, as well as what she embodies, challenges the hegemonic domains of heterosexuality, yet she also does not necessarily embrace, at least not comfortably, a subject position that renders her an outsider in ways that exclude her from community or reduce her to something that, in the words of Miss Eva, "'tain't natural." I've accepted it all my life, and it's nothing I'm ashamed of. I lost a father because I refused to be ashamed of it-but it doesn't make me any different from anyone else in the world. [...] There are two things that have been a constant in my life since I was sixteen years old-beige bras and oatmeal. The day before I first fell in love with a woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, put on a beige bra, and went to school. The day after I fell in love with that woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, and put on a beige bra. I was no different the day before or after that happened. (165)

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  A counterstance, coupled with a politics of recognition, occurs, however, in Michelle Obama's official White House portrait. In her official portrait, First Lady Obama dons a black sleeveless dress (baring/bearing arms literally and figuratively), and in the backdrop is a picture of Thomas Jefferson, former U.S. president, writer of the Declaration of Independence, and slaveowner (who fathered children by Sally Hemings, the enslaved half sister of his deceased wife). Michelle Obama's posture, attire, and agency in engaging on her own terms, evidenced in the picture-read within the larger historical context of Jefferson, whom she renders as backdrop as she is foregrounded, centralized and occupying the forefront-represent an interesting counterrepresentation that, whether calculated or inadvertent, achieves a number of results. It not only subverts a precarious historical past that would otherwise render black women's bodies the literal property and object of others' ownership, pleasure, and even disposal (whether physical, sexual, relating to labor, or otherwise). It also reconstitutes the terms of black womanhood, foregrounding it and embodied agency and subjectivity, while rejecting white male hegemonic or patriarchal control, as the Jefferson symbol comes to represent. For, it "executes a self-conscious taunting that reaches across the span of history to repudiate the violence and brutality suffered by so many enslaved women. Michelle [Obama] stands boldly in a White House where she is mistress, not slave. Her body is for her," as political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry cogently posits."4 And, moreover, it serves, she further asserts, as "an act of resistance" for her, as a black woman, to "demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United States, black women's bodies have often been valued only to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others."' The photograph is, thus, iconographic and political in that it opposes U.S. historical and contemporaneous proclivities to designate black women's bodies and pleasures within the realm of disbelonging and, thus, at the ownership, voyeurism, and service of others. She dictates its terms and, concomitantly, "normalizes" black womanhood in a postmodern sense, yet also transgresses totalizing constructions and paradigms in ways that offer possibilities and potentialities, inherently empowering, where black womanhood, racialized gender representation, and sexuality are concerned. Her gesture, and this very spirit, parallels that of this book-a nexus of race, gender, representation, and transgression in relation to black women and their bodies that demonstrates the transhistorical reach and temporal ubiquity of these racial/ sexual/gendered dynamics. This book, like First Lady Michelle Obama's official White House portrait, is a deliberate effort to subvert, reconstitute, and disrupt so that stereotypes or restrictions do not dictate black women's comportment, govern the politics of our intimacies and passion-private or public-or reduce black expression to perversity or aberration but, rather, place it within a continuum constitutive and reflective of the existential human (sexual included) condition.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  As Madhu Dubey insightfully avers regarding black literary and cultural postmodernism, the "idea of a cohesive and singular black community" is a "strained" sensibility; and "literary and cultural critics are recalling and refurbishing models of community and of racial representation developed earlier in the century" in the post-civil rights, postmodern era.49 To further complicate Dubey's claim and take it a step further, I suggest that models of community are not just "recalled" or "refurbished" but reexamined and scrutinized in a way that subverts particular politics that consolidate around race, gender, and sexuality to show the interplay of differences-not, that is, in a fashion that results in a disintegration of racialized community, but rather in one that illuminates its potential and transformative politics. To this end, and as these manifest in Sula, the eponymous character serves as the corporeal entity/ reality, the transformative capacity of postmodern blackness, who queers-destabilizes, transgresses, subverts-the "normative." Sula "queers" or "throw[s] shade on" the putative norm and its very "meaning" as it relates to blackness-challenging "heteronormativity and heterosexism"-while concomitantly disrupting "notions of assimilation and absorption" associated with particular constructions of the designation "black."" Sula's sentiments regarding having practically nothing-no financial wealth, no husband, no children-and owning, instead, her "self" are revolutionary concepts for women, in which reverberate female subjectivity and postmodern black desire enacted throughout her existence. Not only does she comprehend and refuse to submit to the matrixes of domination confronting her as a black woman, but she invents new alternative states of being, resists marginalization, negotiates uncharted territory, disdains binaries, destabilizes patriarchy and a heteropatriarchal "normativity," as well as traverses the classical black female script and its racialized gender (sexual) confines. In so doing, she, as a "new world black and new world woman," not only transgresses convention but also claims and asserts her right to black female subjectivity. [image file=img/page0099_0000.svg] Through the repetition of deviant practices by multiple individuals, new identities, communities, and politics might emerge where seemingly deviant, unconnected behavior can be transformed into conscious acts of resistance. -CATHY COHEN [W]e know more about the elision of sexuality by black women than we do about the possible varieties of expression of sexual desire. Thus what we have is a very narrow view of black women's sexuality. -EVELYNN HAMMONDS The differences made by race in self-representation and identity argue for the necessity to examine, ques tion, or con tes t the usefulness and/or the limitations of current discourses on lesbian and gay sexualities (...J; from there, we could then go on to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, a nother way of thinking the sexual. -TERESA DE LAURETIS

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Published in 1973 while Morrison was an editor at Random House in New York City, where she created a list in black literature reflective of the racial consciousness of the black political movements, Sula dialogizes not only black nationalist ideologies, but also black feminist sensibilities, including intersectionality, and the sexual liberation prompted by the sexual revolution. In that same year, in the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court decreed that abortion was legal, a landmark ruling in tandem and contemporaneous with the liberal politics of the sexual revolution. Sula functions as the material embodiment of black female subjectivity that embraces blackness that neither compromises nor negates her woman-freedom or liberation, sexually or otherwise. Functioning, then, outside the parameters of sociocommunal prescriptions and modalities for women, Sula transgresses convention and concomitantly invests in her "self" rather than live a life of conformity.30 Sula is unlike other Bottom women because she uncharacteristically repudiates conventional life (particularly marriage and motherhood), as well as transgresses the classical black female script, whose tenets her various enactments of "misbehavior" resist and subvert. In her obstinate and fierce refusal to marry and "have some babies" to "settle" her down-as her grandmother Eva suggests immediately upon Sula's return to Medallion-Sula insists that rather than "make somebody else," she wants to invent her "self" (92). Her refusal to acquiesce or conform is transparent, then, in her transgression against communal expectations for women regarding reproduction, which also undermines a fundamental tenet of the (black) nationalist agenda: that black women should "make babies for the revolution." As reproduction is fundamental to nationalist paradigms and agendas, Sula's refusal to reproduce also calls into question and scrutinizes nationalist visions of (an imagined) black nation. She challenges a modality centered around reproduction and presents another model-a "new world blackness," to revert to an earlier argument-that destabilizes and presents a postmodern black notion of "nation." At the crux of this new world black subjectivity is not an intrinsic expectation that black women reproduce. It is critically important, then, that shortly after Eva encourages Sula to marry, bear children, and thereby conform to the roles society ascribes to women, Sula, going against all cultural ethics, commits her to a nursing home: "At the sight of Eva being carried out [...] Sula [stood] holding some papers against the wall, at the bottom of which, just above the word `guardian,' she very carefully wrote Miss Sula Mae Peace" (94, emphasis mine). Sula committed Eva to a nursing home and took particular delight in that act, illustrating her disregard and contempt for both cultural ethics and (Bottom) communal mores. Her pride in, and determination to preserve, her independence and single-woman status is evidenced by her careful and deliberate inscription of "Miss" on the documents and her unwillingness to allow exterior forces, even her own grandmother, to threaten her agency and infringe upon her lifestyle, autonomy, and woman-freedom.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I remained in El Paso. Once again, a letter came with a plane ticket, to New York. A man who had read my book and was outraged by its treatment in The New York Review of Books invited me to attend the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in Tanglewood. But I was waiting for an answer to a request I had made of Grove; and it arrived, a further advance on royalties so I could make the down-payment on a house for my mother. I flew to New York to meet another major figure in my life, the man who had invited me to Tanglewood; and I spent the following months with him in a fourteenth-storey apartment overlooking the Hudson River (an enormous eagle appeared on the balcony one day and peered in through a glass wall), then in Tanglewood; and then we went to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Islands. On a beach I read in a New York gossip column that I was a guest of Mr. So-and-so on Fire Island, a place I have never visited. That was the first I would learn of several men claiming to be me, impostures made possible by the fact that I had decided not to promote this book, to retain my private life; only my publishers knew I was in New York, in Riverdale. In late September I returned to El Paso, to another of the most cherished memories of all my life, of my mother joyfully showing me the house I had bought for her, her new furnishings. She had a dinner-reception for me, with my brothers and sisters and my special great-aunt. Strangers appeared at my house, creating ruses to be let in. One youngwoman came to the door, claiming to be the “Barbara” of this book. In school, in the army, and on the streets, I had been what is called a loner—very much so. These incidents increased my isolation. But it seemed appropriate to me, this period of “austerity”: I did not want my life to change radically while the lives of the people I had written about remained the same. In El Paso I began the transition from “youngman” to “man.” I created my own gym in my mother’s new home, and I began working out fiercely with weights. Some excellent reviews began appearing, and eventually the book would be translated into about a dozen languages. Letters arrived daily—moving letters, from men, women, young ones, older ones, homosexual, heterosexual. I answered every one. When I went out, it was usually to drive into the Texas desert. I had only two or three friends. With the exception of brief trips to Los Angeles and one to New York, I remained in El Paso in relative isolation until my mother died and I left the city perhaps forever.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  First Lady Michelle Obama, born in 1964 in the midst of the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and sexual liberation movements, might be "read"-if we are to engage or pay close attention to the semiotics of race, racialized gendered sexuality, and attire-as the embodiment of a particular duality. She embodies a certain "postraciality," if even illusory, coupled with a postmodern blackness, which I have discussed throughout this work. That is, she embodies a certain complexity of blackness, interestingly one that both deploys and attenuates respectability, that is not unitary, stagnant, or homogeneous, which is especially evident in her attire and fashion sense, which prompts attention and analogies to another First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. While her attire is characterized by traditional style (propriety), it is simultaneously marked with a unique distinctiveness that stands out, goes beyond and exceeds-or transgresses-the standard and the basic. In fact, it even challenges what constitutes "the norm." This sensibility is typified most transparently in her choice of fashion and style, particularly cut and colors: vibrant and lively (rather than muted, dull, or subdued) yet not over-the-top outrageous or anomalous. Equally significant, Michelle Obama's deliberate exposure of her toned, muscular, and defined arms is emblematic of a certain subjectivity, agency, and orchestrated self-posturing-an "unbought and unbought" gesture-in which reverberates a body in ownership of its own display, which is consequential especially in light of the historical ways in which black women's bodies have been on public display, both literally and figuratively, at the orchestration of others. She transcends and strategically subverts, then, historical ways of situating black female sexuality in that hers is not on literal public display: not, that is, on a slave auction block or exploited in museums with exposed genitalia like the Venus Hottentotwith her sexuality conspicuously invoked or exposed.' Yet, here lies the complexity and even tension of blackness in America: her sexuality is "on display" figuratively, metaphorically, and in another less conspicuous form: in the constant, ever-present fixation on her body. That is, not only a fixation on its physicality or its very physique, but also on what shrouds it (clothing) and, equally if not more provocative, what it shrouds: a latent, everpresent sexuality covertly engaged publicly vis-a-vis the discursive that ranges from pregnancy rumors-a (hyper)sexualizing and encoding of sorts-to the iconographic. The August 2012 issue of the Spanish magazine Fuera de Serie illustrates this point. Its cover image shows Michelle Obama's face photoshopped onto French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist's classic 18oo Portrait d une negresse, which famously depicts with partial nudity a (former) enslaved black woman in headscarf and white gown with one breast exposed. [image file=img/img0005.jpg] FIGURE C.1 Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d une Negresse, 1800.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  At an early Buttface we were leaving a local bar when Hayes spied a bulldozer in the field behind the lodge. He discovered, to his astonishment, the keys had been left inside, so he hopped in and moved the earth all around the field, and in the parking lot, quitting only when he narrowly missed crushing several cars. Hayes on a bulldozer, I thought: As much as the swoosh, that might be our logo. I always said that Woodell made the trains run on time, but it was Hayes who laid down the tracks. Hayes set up all the esoteric accounting systems without which the company would have ground to a halt. When we first went from manual to automated accounting, Hayes acquired the first primitive machines, and by constantly mending them, modifying them, or pounding them with his big hammy fists, he kept them uncannily accurate. When we first started doing business outside the United States, foreign currencies became a devilishly tricky problem, and Hayes set up an ingenious currency-hedging system, which made the spread more reliable, more predictable. Despite our hijinks, despite our eccentricities, despite our physical limitations, I concluded in 1976 that we were a formidable team. (Years later a famous Harvard business professor studying Nike came to the same conclusion. “Normally,” he said, “if one manager at a company can think tactically and strategically, that company has a good future. But boy are you lucky: More than half the Buttfaces think that way!”) Undoubtedly we looked, to any casual observer, like a sorry, motley crew, hopelessly mismatched. But in fact we were more alike than different, and that gave a coherence to our goals and our efforts. We were mostly Oregon guys, which was important. We had an inborn need to prove ourselves, to show the world that we weren’t hicks and hayseeds. And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy. Our meetings were defined by contempt, disdain, and heaps of abuse. Oh, what abuse. We called each other terrible names. We rained down verbal blows. While floating ideas, and shooting down ideas, and hashing out threats to the company, the last thing we took into account was someone’s feelings. Including mine. Especially mine. My fellow Buttfaces, my employees, called me Bucky the Bookkeeper, constantly. I never asked them to stop. I knew better. If you showed any weakness, any sentimentality, you were dead. I remember a Buttface when Strasser decided we weren’t being “aggressive” enough in our approach. Too many bean counters in this company, he said. “So before this meeting starts I want to interject something. I’ve prepared here a counter budget.” He waved a big binder.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  "With a twist that was all her own imagination," as the narratorial consciousness indicates, "she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her" (ii8). In her quest to please herself, she, upon her return to the Bottom, disrupts social "norms." A wanderer and neither wife nor mother, she exists incongruously with the women of the Bottom and concomitantly "violates" community sanctions: she sleeps with other women's husbands (including Nel's), wears no underwear to church functions, and, far worse by community standards, putatively has sex with white men. It is Sula's sexual "escapades" with white men that diametrically oppose the script, as well as flout the tenets of black nationalism, which explicitly demands black women's sexual fidelity-to black men-as a way of countering dominant society's stigmatization, denigration, and association of black women with sexual deviance and pathology, as well as in allegiance with nationalist ideologies.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Sula destabilizes or "queers," to evoke Robert Reid-Pharr, "narratives that are obscured by" an "overprivileging of traditional scripts."40 Sula and Ajax's sexual exchange is, that is, mutually inclusive with sexual pleasure and reciprocity, overturning the insistence on the suppression of female sexual pleasure for the sake of male sexual gratification. Sula embodies sexual freedom and agency that challenges patriarchy, male (sexual) hegemony, or what literary scholar Erica Edwards identifies as "a gendered hierarchy of [...] value that grants uninterrogated power to normative masculinity."41 This offers a crucial reconfiguration of heterosexual intimacy and the politics of passion in the novel, as well as a reconsideration of heteronormativity and the traditional (post)coital heterosexual paradigm. Moreover, it constitutes "a gender and sexual disruption to heteropatriarchy and inspire[s]" alternative modalities, "practices and formulations" for (sexual) subjectivities to those propounded by nationalism 42 As such, Sula redefines the politics and possibilities of sexual intimacy-without "normalizing" heteropatriarchal dictatesin ways that privilege ownership of her sexual self, subjectivity, and (black female) sexual citizenship 43 Sula and the Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity In "The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity," black feminist scholar bell hooks differentiates between opposition and resistance, neither of which is, she asserts, synonymous with subjectivity. The process of becoming subjects emerges as one comes to comprehend the ways in which matrixes of domination work in one's own life, "as one invents new, alternative habits of being, and resists from that marginal space of difference inwardly defined."44 As a radical agent who transgresses convention and societal definitions of "normative" behavior for women, Sula, even by hooks's definition alone, typifies radical black subjectivity. Not only does Sula well understand, and indeed embody, the simultaneity of oppressions confronting black women, but it is also precisely out of this realization that she rejects her marginalization and exists.