UCLA

Historian Andrew Cayton has referred to the American Midwest as the “anti-region” due to its lack of a uniform regional narrative. My study, “Liminal Erasures: Midwest Black Sexual Personhood in Visual Culture,” builds on Cayton’s position to argue that the Midwest understood as a set of political and economic relations, rather than as an established geography best demonstrates the liminality of Blackness. Liminality refers to the position and movement of black subjects within and outside of personhood vis-à-vis discourses of freedom and capital, and I delineate the ways in which the Midwest as a political formation plays a central role in this process. While I do not attempt to offer a totalizing understanding of “The Midwest,” my project instead engages the question: In what ways has black gendered and sexual personhood been defined and actively shaped by prevailing cultural, legal, and geographical understandings of the American Midwest? While the Midwest has been a crucial site for the constitution of black personhood, it has been understudied in black feminist and queer studies and gender and sexuality studies more broadly. “Liminal Erasures” aims to fill this gap by highlighting the ways in which the Midwest’s particular history of claiming a liberal anti-racism, especially in comparison with the South comes into productive tension with its histories of anti-black policing and sexual regulation.

Guided by an interdisciplinary approach, I examine a diverse archive of cultural and historical examples in my consideration of black liminality in the Midwest. For example, I discuss legal decisions that articulate and envision foundational understandings of the region like the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, alongside key visual cultural examples such as the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification arrest records of black women who worked as sex workers in downtown Minneapolis in the late nineteenth century. “Liminal Erasures” attends to the ways in which black escape, resistance, and disappearance from institutions and visual archives of policing and regulation illuminate the Midwest as an effective site to capture and move forward the living tensions and contradictions that exist between American liberal democracy and capitalism.