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Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. By RODERICK A . FERGUSON . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pp. 175. $53.24 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).
We all know well the time-honored, clichéd riddle about what happens when you assume: you make an ass out of you and me. Roderick A. Ferguson's Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique asks a decidedly nonclichéd version ofthat question by querying and critiquing "canonical sociology's" assumptions about African American culture. Aberrations in Black may be a little book (as one reviewer commented), but it has very big ambitions. And its arrival onto the intellectual scene could not be more timely. In the words of reviewer Judidi Halberstam:
The clarity of Ferguson's vision makes his narrative about how the histories of race and sexuality have come undone seem obvious, and, indeed, this is one of diose books that leave you wondering how you could ever have thought otherwise about the topics at hand. Yet the clarity is due only to Ferguson's generous way of bringing his reader along through a difficult argument; his book actually tells an immensely complex story about how both liberalism and historical materialism have posited gender and sexual normativity as crucial to social transformation.1
Aberrations is a text with which serious students of black sociology will inevitably have to contend. Though African American literary critics have largely eschewed (and widi good reason) the relevance of sociological approaches to African American literature, Ferguson's text also recasts this historically vexed relationship between sociology and African American literary criticism for our reconsideration. And finally, Aberrations further excavates and clarifies a part of the useable past...