Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Kim is Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at Brown University.

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Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................xiPreface.....................................................................................................xvIntroduction................................................................................................11. Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and Its Homophobic Critique in Invisible Man........................412. Bluesprints for Negro Manhood: Ellison and the Vernacular................................................833. The Legacy of Fu-Manchu: Orientalist Desire and the Figure of the Asian "Homosexual".....................1244. "Shells of the Dead": The Melancholy of Masculine Desire.................................................1605. The Fantasy of a Yellow Vernacular: Mimetic Hunger and the "Chameleon Chinaman"..........................203Coda........................................................................................................232Notes.......................................................................................................251Index.......................................................................................................279

Chapter One

In asserting a continuity between the works of cultural nationalist writers like Frank Chin and Amiri Baraka and those of Ralph Ellison, this study forwards a view of the author of Invisible Man that may seem counterintuitive, at least to some readers. But what I will demonstrate in the following chapters is how intimately linked these writers are in their shared reliance on a set of homophobic figurations for depicting the libidinal structure of racism, and also in their mutual belief in the capacity of literature to transcend the unmanning effects of white racism.

There are, however, many good reasons for perceiving Ellison and a writer like Amiri Baraka as positioned at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. While Baraka's writings-at least those produced in the sixties-evince an undisguised anger at whites and white culture and espouse a separatist ethos, the interviews and essays by Ellison with which most readers are familiar express a nearly Pollyannaish optimism about the possibilities of American democracy and black life. Moreover, Ellison's views are expressed in a mannered and elegant prose style that seems to float above the often vitriolic rhetoric that cultural nationalist writers tend to deploy in their polemics. It is also true that a very real antagonism emerged between Ellison and black nationalist writers in the late sixties and early seventies, a period when the political and literary reputations of more overtly confrontational writers like Baraka were on the rise, at least within black literary circles, and when much speculation emerged over Ellison's apparent inability to complete a second novel. As Darryl Pinckney has observed, "Black Power nearly buried [Ellison's] reputation as he faced impolite audiences of black students from Harvard to Iowa, and refused to join in the mood of outrage, declining to call himself black instead of Negro." In order to bring into focus how this ideological divide has in fact been overstated, I want first to devote some attention to uncovering how it has been produced.

The tenor of the attacks directed at Ellison by many black writers who were angered by the author's apparent apolitical detachment is conveyed quite vividly by Ernest Kaiser. In an essay included in a 1970 issue of Black World devoted to Ellison, Kaiser describes Ellison as "an Establishment writer, an Uncle Tom." In his afterword to the anthology Black Fire, Larry Neal faults Ellison for so entirely framing his representation of black life in literary and philosophical terms drawn from high Western culture, citing the irrelevance of such a perspective to the "New Breed" of black Americans:

The things that concerned Ellison are interesting to read, but contemporary black youth feels another force in the world today. We know who we are, and we are not invisible, at least not to each other. We are not Kafkaesque creatures stumbling through a white light of confusion and absurdity. The light is black (now, get that!) as are most of the meaningful tendencies in the world.

For at least one critic, Ellison's open appropriation of white cultural resources was enough to throw into question his masculinity. In an essay that appeared in the same issue of Black World as Kaiser's, Clifford Mason asserts that "[t]he burden that Ellison's genius put on his manhood (and what our racial needs required) was for him to have been a lion sui generis, not an acquiescer posing as a tiger. Black literature deserved its own references, its own standards, its own rules." The only black literary manhood worthy of the name, Mason claims, is one that insists on "its own references, its own standards, its own rules." As the many attacks on Ellison make clear, he is perceived as "an ascquiescer posing as a tiger" rather than as "a lion sui generis" because of his unapologetic insistence on the racial hybridity of his literary identity, on the fundamental influence on his work of writers like Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, and Dostoyevksy.

Given these criticisms, one might conclude that the literary project to which Ellison devoted his career was irrelevant to the needs of black nationalism-that proponents of a Black Aesthetic would find no suitable materials in Ellison's writings for fashioning the politicized identity, the revolutionary black masculine subjectivity, they heroized. Ellison's own statements during this period, moreover, seem intent on widening rather than narrowing the perceived ideological gap between his own position and that taken by writers like Baraka. But if he came to serve as a whipping boy for many black nationalist writers, he certainly gave as good as he got. Even before Baraka became Baraka-when he was simply LeRoi Jones-he was subjected to Ellison's pointed critique. In a review of Jones's Blues People originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1964 and included as part of Shadow and Act, Ellison wrote: "The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues."

In this review, Ellison clearly stakes out an oppositional position to an emergent strand of black intellectual work that he presents Jones's book as epitomizing:

Blues People, like much that is written by Negro Americans at the present moment, takes on an inevitable resonance from the Freedom Movement, but it is itself characterized by a straining for a note of militancy which is, to say the least, distracting. Its introductory mood of scholarly analysis frequently shatters into a dissonance of accusation, and one gets the impression that while Jones wants to perform a crucial task which he feels someone should take on-as indeed someone should-he is frustrated by the restraint demanded of the critical pen and would like to pick up a club. (248)

Given that Ellison himself had devoted an entire section of his book...