Warped Masculinity and the Resistance of Ungovernable Selves in Daniel Black’s Novel The Coming

Relying on psychoanalytic, philosophical, and pastoral concepts, this article begins by analyzing and describing the noxious masculinity of slavers in Daniel Black’s 2015 novel The Coming. This foray helps understand the relentlessness of white male brutality and indifference and the slavers’ fear and hatred of human precarity, vulnerability, and dependency. The second part of the article entails understanding the resilience and resistance of enslaved persons in the face of routine and repeated assaults on their bodies, minds, and relationships. There is, in bare life, something—an excess—that cannot be extinguished except through death. This excess can be understood as ungovernable selves and is evident in acts of resistance and resilience to the warped masculinity of the slavers.