Sex Critical Essay | Marilyn Nelson Waniek

Marilyn Nelson Waniek

SOURCE: "The Space Where Sex Should Be: Toward a Definition of the Black Literary Tradition," in Studies in Black Literature, Vol. 6, No. 3, Fall, 1975, pp. 7-13.

In the following essay, Waniek discusses the reasons why "the great space where sex ought to be" in novels by African American men is usually filled by violence.

Many critics have complained of a scarcity of fulfilling heterosexual relationships in novels by Black American authors. Writes James Baldwin, for example, in an essay about Richard Wright entitled "Alas, Poor Richard": "In most of the novels written by Negroes until today (with the exception of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go) there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence. This violence, as in so much of Wright's work, is gratuitous and compulsive because the root of the violence is never examined."¹...
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