A Minor Hold: Gayl Jones and the Aesthetics of "Congregate Life"

A Minor Hold thinks about Gayl Jones' literatures
in relation to larger questions of blackness and gathering, black gatherings.
Through an engagement with some of Jones' early short stories, particularly those that center characters figured as mentally ill or cognitively disabled, Sarah Cervenak considers how Jones' writing functions like a barricade against the round ups waged by the putatively self-possessed. She argues that Jones' craft is as much literary as it is sculptural; in writing, Jones makes harbors for racialized, sexualized and cripped social life. Put another way, In writing, Jones spins minor holds against the violence of worldly seizure.

Sarah Jane Cervenak is an associate professor, jointly appointed in the Women's and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies programs at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Gathering: Toward an Aesthetic of (Un) Holding queries the Black radical, feminist potential of gathering in post-1960s Black literary and visual arts. She is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke 2014).