Aestheticism, Negrophobia, and Interracial Desire in the Writings of Richard Bruce Nugent

This article explores Richard Bruce Nugent's engagement with Victorian aestheticism, focusing on how he used it to help his readers perceive the personhood of queer Black subjects. The only openly gay figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent drew inspiration from aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley to challenge the sociopolitical expectations of his contemporaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Despite holding certain aestheticist beliefs themselves, both men disapproved of Nugent's decadent homoeroticism, viewing it as a distraction from the political demands placed upon Black artists. However, this essay argues that Nugent's aestheticism, particularly his use of extravagant color imagery, served as a powerful tool for reimagining interracial desire and Black queer identity. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's concept of “negrophobia,” which describes the cultural fear and fetishization of Blackness, and Sylvia Wynter's notion of “sociogeny,” which refers to the aesthetic shaping of perceptions of racial difference, this essay demonstrates how Nugent's work subverts the dehumanizing objectification of Black men, and how his depictions of gay interracial relationships challenge the hierarchical and objectifying gaze imposed by white supremacy. By embracing aestheticism's emphasis on beauty and pleasure, Nugent offers a new vision of subjectivity in which queer Black men are recognized as desiring subjects. This essay ultimately contends that Nugent's aestheticism remains politically relevant today, as it transforms pleasure and eroticism into radical sites of resistance, challenging dominant cultural narratives of race, desire, and power.