The Interracial Screen Kiss: Haptic Cinema and Racial Politics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Aldous Huxley was entrenched in a film culture that represented, discussed, and banned interracial kisses on screen. This same culture theorized cinema as haptic, a quality that white film theorists particularly ascribed to Black actors. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) portrays a kiss between a Black man and a white woman during a tactile-visual cinematic experience, the “feelies.” This article rereads the feelies by suggesting that cinematic modernist writing perpetuates the relationship between touch and race, particularly white supremacist conceptualizations of skin. It argues that the interracial kiss on screen links haptic cinema spectatorship with racialized cinematic representation, and that the modern experience of seeing a close-up kiss can be indexed to early twentieth-century concerns about race relations and sensory discipline.