This chapter examines two divergent approaches to writing autobiographically about gay Asian American experience. Justin Chin’s autobiographical poetry and personal essays, published in the 1990s and early 2000s, embody the Marxist and anti-identarian tendencies of queer of color critique. His work self-consciously sought to push against the demand for a certain performance of oppression prevalent in a literary marketplace dominated by white appetites. In contrast, the contributors to the first collected volume of queer Asian American writing, Restoried Selves (2004), convey the challenges they have faced according to identarian scripts. In doing so, they slip into the role of the protestant ethnic as theorized by Rey Chow. The final part of the chapter attends to more recent works of gay Asian American autobiography and maps their attempts to avoid representing gay Asian American experience as a legible commodity to a predominantly white, heterosexual audience.

In satiric tragedy folly, vice and corruption are exposed and subjected to rhetorical attack. This chapter traces the origins of satiric tragedy in the tradition of English verse satire, itself rooted in Roman satire. This rich and vital tradition ended abruptly on 1 June, 1599 with the Bishops’ Ban, when the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered an end to the production of verse satire and the confiscation and destruction of specific extant works, including works by John Marston and Thomas Middleton, authors who went on to produce some of the most notable examples of satiric drama. Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy testifies to this origin and exemplifies the reflexive nature of the genre, i.e. its condemnation reflects upon the satirist even as it is deployed against its targets. The satirist must possess an intimate knowledge of vice in order to condemn it, and yet he must retain at least the appearance of integrity. This tension is particularly pronounced in The Revenger’s Tragedy, in which Vindice disguises himself as a bawd and works towards the ruin of his own family in the pursuit of his vengeance. The chapter examines satiric tragedy as a locus for social and institutional subversion.

The missionary encounter between Ireland and Africa is complex and evolving, withongoing reverberations in both societies. The Irish missionary movement in the earlytwentieth century echoed the discourse of British imperialism, and was part of theproject of establishing the Irish as ‘white’.  Irish literature complicates this narrative:missionaries in the work of Brian Friel, Mary Lavin, and John McGahern are figuresof ambivalence and isolation. Nigerian writers such as John Munonye and S. O.Mezu detail this intercultural contact from the African perspective.  The genesis ofcultural diplomacy and trade relationships between Ireland and Africa can be foundin these earlier missionary encounters. Irish NGOs are active in historical missionarylocations, replicating the discourse of the missionaries who came before them.Growing immigration and falling vocations has led to a reversal in the relationshipbetween the countries, whereby African priests come to Ireland to re-evangelize aChurch reeling from clerical abuse scandals.

Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of poetry and short stories substantiate the first serious Irish exploration of Japanese spirituality. In Japanese thought Hearn found both liberation from repressive aspects of Catholicism and alternate perspectives on concepts such as the soul. Initial interest in Shintō drew Hearn to investigate Zen Buddhism. Yeats also read on Zen Buddhism, but was ambivalent on its concept of emptiness, seemingly repelled by the teachings agains individualism. Irish writers such as Helen Waddell were drawn to the sacredness of place in Japanese thought, while David Burleigh’s work has centred on the haiku, the form that interrogates the relationship between nature and spirit.

In Chapter 5, the discussion of Fanon’s views on Marxism purposefully leads to three stages of development. First, this chapter examines his assertion that in the post-independence state the bourgeois phase is useless and that the lumpenproletariat is not a reactionary class but rather is the most revolutionary; an assertion which reverses the roles Marx assigned to the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat and radically subverts Marxist theory. Second, it charts the historical development of what Fanon dubs the lumpenproletariat in The Wretched of the Earth, by examining Marx’s and Sartre’s analyses of the impact which French colonialism had on the emergence of this class of people as well as on France’s democratic and republican political institutions. Third, it endeavours to read Fanon and Marx, contrapuntally engaging with Peter Stallybrass and Ranjana Khanna and with the political role they respectively assign to the lumpenproletariat.

This chapter considers American gay life writing with an emphasis on drag-performers and/as genderqueer subjects. It aims to lay out historical trends in the understanding of drag as a career and its connection to genderqueer subjectivity, arguing that much of drag and genderqueer life writing eschews rigid ontologies for more unfixed inhabitations of gendered and sexual subjectivities. Autobiographies published between the 1970s and the 1990s tend to treat drag performance as a vocational calling for gay and/or genderqueer individuals. By the 2000s, we see a trend toward memoirs that treat drag as an unserious diversion from normal life. Starting in the 2010s, there is increased emphasis on identity over vocation, reflecting new public interest in understanding genderqueer subjectivity but also increased pressure to define oneself through legible categories. Coeval with such accounts is the emergence of drag superstars propelled to prominence by RuPaul, yielding drag autobiographies for a mainstream market. As this new trend suggests, we may in the mid-2020s be situated at the cusp of a renaissance in drag and genderqueer autobiography.

Chapter 1 provides an account of Fanon’s critical indebtedness to Sartrean existential phenomenology. It also engages with his critique of negritude. The aim of this chapter is to inscribe Black Orpheus (as well as Anti-Semite and Jew) in the philosophical discourse of Being and Nothingness, two correlative works which elaborate a phenomenology of perception, race and embodied selves. These works were cornerstones for the negritude movement and had an impact on Fanon. While Sartre considers negritude as a source of poetry, Fanon accuses him of damming up its poetic source by abstracting the being-of-the-black. Fanon acknowledges the importance of Sartre’s intervention in Black Orpheus but criticizes it for intellectualizing the experience of the black.

This chapter gives an overview of the development of closet tragedy in early modern England and its place in relation to the tragic genre. Rather than dramatising incidents, closet drama emphasises the reactions of the characters and the form often features lengthy rhetorical speeches abounding in devices such as apostrophe and stichomythia, along with a chorus. Although the form has often been dismissed as a rather inept protest movement against the perceived aesthetic lapses of the popular theatre, this chapter shows that the extent of this schism between the two forms has been exaggerated and that closet drama was fertile ground for generic experiments. Fulke Greville’s Mustapha, the first in a projected trilogy of political dramas, departs from the prevailing tradition in closet drama for dramatising episodes from ancient Roman history, focusing instead upon a sequence of events from the recent history of the Ottoman Empire, involving the sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and thus sharing common ground with the so-called Turk plays which were enjoying considerable popularity in the commercial theatres. Greville’s play raises questions about the nature of tragic heroism and explores the opportunities and limitations of tragedy as a locus for political comment and generic experiments.

With its fresh and unprecedented opportunities for sexual involvements and new self-definitions, World War II was a pivotal event in the history of queer Americans. This is especially true of males who experienced the war as young adults, either as civilians or servicemen. Relying on the recollections of fourteen men, this chapter examines the war’s varying impact. Some of these recollections are lengthy portions of full-scale autobiographies, while others are considerably briefer. Some of the men are well known, such as Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Gore Vidal, while others are obscure, such as journalist Ricardo Brown, actor Gordon Heath, and diarist Donald Vining. A few autobiographies, such as Vidal’s Palimpsest and composer Ned Rorem’s Knowing When to Stop, are classics. In contrast, Ricardo Brown’s The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s is ostensibly only an ethnography of a gay bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, through the eyes of one patron, yet it is an essential examination of wartime queer life itself. Analyzed and compared side by side, these fourteen memoirs provide a heretofore unappreciated glimpse of both queer life and the war.

In both his fiction and nonfiction, Edmund White often repeats life events he refers to as “radioactive,” autobiographical moments full of meaning for him and for his readers. At least one critic has seen in these repetitions White’s reluctance to speak in monologue as a singular gay voice. This chapter argues, however, that White uses the repetition of such “radioactive” moments to create an authoritative voice that explores emerging histories and sociologies of gay life in the United States and Europe over the past sixty years. White doesn’t dissolve the distinction between fiction and nonfiction; rather, he uses both in their different contexts to analyze the conditions that have made (at least white, middle-class) gay meaning possible. He repeats his own life experiences to help articulate and legitimize new and emerging discourses of gay living, to help explain for himself, other gay men, and the general population how gay life and thought in the United States constitutes a continuum of social meaning.

Domestic tragedy, on the face of it the simplest and most unpretentious of tragic forms, is in fact potentially one of the most ambiguous. Domestic is set at home, both in the sense of taking place in England rather than being set abroad and also in that it is located in one or more private houses rather than in the public space of the court. At the same time as the genre foregrounds the private house, though, it calls into question how private it truly is: the plays constantly remind us how many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture construed the domestic situation as a mirroring in miniature of the hierarchical ordering of the state as a whole. Moreover many domestic tragedies have two plots, whose respective endings are often of very different tonalities. In Yarington’s(?) Two Lamentable Tragedies one plot is set in Italy and the other in England, but they mirror each other in so many ways that we are in effect asked not only what difference there is between the two countries, but to what extent Italy may generally serve in Renaissance drama as a transparent proxy for England.

This chapter situates trans autobiography in the history of American gay autobiography. I trace an incomplete lineage of popular United States transgender autobiographies from Christine Jorgensen to Janet Mock – a roughly seventy-year chronology. Referring to autobiographies both canonical and lesser-known, I document trends in trans self-narration, consider the ways in which trans autobiographers variably give accounts of what it means to be or to have a gender, and suggest the ways in which the genre of trans autobiography, though calcified around specific notions of medico-juridical legibility, might in fact move beyond the inherently and paradoxically restrictive genre restrictions that seem to inhere in its production. Trans gender autobiography emerged from, I argue, both the medical imperative for narrative accounts of transness and autobiographers’ desires to serve as sources of helpful and hopeful information for trans and non-trans people alike.

This chapter examines Jonson’s Sejanus as exemplifying the tension generally distinguishing Renaissance English tragedies on Roman subjects: that between the accurate dramatic reconstruction of history and the building up of decorous stateliness and didacticism. Arguments from Roman history intensified the imperatives of historiography along with those of instruction and grandeur, and these imperatives tended to come into conflict. Three features Jonson and other dramatists imagined as characteristic of the Roman mind include a pronounced sense of national identity and history, a preoccupation with forms and processes of government, and a reliance on Stoic moral philosophy. The chapter also touches on Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War, Massinger’s Roman Actor, and the anonymous Statelie Tragedie of Claudius Tiberius Nero.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”