Writing Manhood in Black And Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, And the Literary Politics of Identity - Brossura

Kim, Daniel Y.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804751099 ISBN 13: 9780804751094

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2005

Riassunto

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation.

The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

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

Dalla quarta di copertina

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation.
The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation.
The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

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Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow

RALPH ELLISON, FRANK CHIN, AND THE LITERARY POLITICS OF IDENTITYBy Daniel Y. Kim

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5109-4

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

Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and Its Homophobic Critique in Invisible Man

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 of essays, Shadow and Act, to the blues as well as jazz, it is fairly clear whom he might be suggesting as that "someone" capable of taking on that "crucial task" of engaging in a serious study of this topic, whose analytical skills would be disciplined enough to honor "the restraint demanded of the critical pen." Several of the essays in Shadow and Act-which came out in 1964, the year after Jones's study was published-could easily have been subtitled "Blues People." In one of them, "Richard Wright's Blues," Ellison adopts an essentially sociological approach to the relationship between Southern black life and the blues, an approach he denigrates Jones for taking in his book. There seems to be a kind of narcissism of small differences at play in Ellison's critique of Jones, an aggression at a rival whose affinities are themselves the source of the aggression.

What I would like to suggest here is that the perceived gap between the ideologies espoused by black nationalists and those espoused by Ellison has been greatly exaggerated by the parties themselves. As a corrective to this view, it is worth considering that the anthology in which Addison Gayle, Jr., criticized Ellison as a "literary assimilationist"-The Black Aesthetic (1971)-contains ten other references to Ellison, none of which is especially critical. Indeed, Hoyt W. Fuller's essay "Toward a Black Aesthetic" cites Ellison (along with Miles Davis and Cassius Clay, among others) as an exemplar of a "special" black style. Moreover, sandwiched between Clifford Mason's and Ernest Kaiser's essays in the December 1970 issue of Black World (which basically label the author of Invisible Man an Uncle Tom) is a piece by Larry Neal in which he essentially retracts the charges he leveled at Ellison in the Afterword to Black Fire. This essay, "Ellison's Zoot Suit," was subsequently reprinted in Speaking For You (1987), an anthology of criticism on Ellison, much of which tends to adopt a reverential attitude toward the author and his works.

Darryl Pinckney's account of the resurrection of Ellison's reputation in black literary critical circles, moreover, suggests that it may have actually been facilitated by the very black nationalists who seemed intent on burying it. He notes that the rise of Afro-American Studies departments-in many ways an institutional legacy of black nationalism-contributed greatly to the privileged status Ellison now enjoys: Ellison's work "benefited mightily from the rediscovery of folklore in Black Studies and he lived long enough to witness the elevation of Invisible Man to a sort of Ur-text of blackness." This rehabilitation of the novel's racial authenticity, as Pinckney notes, is clearly connected to a tradition of scholarship that has emphasized its author's connections to black folk culture. Moreover, this burnishing of folkloric credentials has enabled a view of the writer to emerge that presents him-pace Clifford Mason-as fully capable of bearing the "burden that [his] genius put on his manhood," of answering "what our racial needs required." "By the time Ellison died in 1994," according to Pinckney, "he was regarded as a cultural treasure, a vindicated father figure for a generation of formerly militant and post-militant black writers who wanted folklore, blues, jazz and black literature to be brainy yet virile subjects" (my emphasis). The resurrection of Ellison's reputation has much to do, as I will elaborate more fully in a later chapter, with the way in which his aesthetic writings-like that of many of the Black Arts aestheticians who would seem to have opposed him-premise their conception of racial, masculine, and literary authenticity on a certain, highly romanticized notion of the black working class, who are imagined to be the bearers of a more muscular form of minority culture. A primary reason why this vernacular ideology has proven to be so attractive to both Baraka and Ellison is precisely because it provides the ideological resources for depicting male writers of color as "brainy yet virile subjects," as exemplars of a racially authentic and wholly masculine literary identity.

To suggest that Ellison's literary project was, like that of many Black Arts writers, framed by questions of gender requires retracing the trajectory of his development as a writer in terms different from the ones critics have generally tended to use. The imposing presence of the author's own extensive commentary has influenced most critics to produce what Kerry McSweeney calls "canonical" readings of Invisible Man, interpretations that "implicitly or explicitly examine the novel within the frameworks provided by Ellison." Such interpretations of Ellison's novel generally echo the optative sentiments concerning American race relations voiced in the novel's epilogue and eloquently reaffirmed in numerous interviews and essays, thereby deemphasizing the palpable anger at whites (and, in the main, at white men) that resounds through the vast bulk of the novel.

One consequence of Ellison's increasingly conservative political stance-his transformation from committed Marxist fellow traveler to anticommunist cold war liberal-is that his later characterizations of his intentions in writing the novel tend to wash out into woolly abstractions and liberal bromides. Take, for instance, the following commentary from his introduction to the thirtieth edition of Invisible Man:

So if the ideal of achieving true political equality eludes us in reality-as it continues to do-there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.

What becomes easily obscured when readers take up Ellison's invitation to read the novel in these terms is that "true political equality" seems to be as elusive in his "fictional vision" as it is in the real world. While he suggests that Invisible Man was "fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal" (xx-xxi), it is simply true that nowhere in the novel is a vision of interracial brotherhood comparable to Twain's ever fleshed out.

In light of Leslie Fiedler's radically desublimated reading of Huck and Jim's raft, moreover (a reading of which Ellison was aware and to which he seems to allude in the novel itself), this radically sublimated invocation of "classic" American literature's royal couple seems intent on leading the reader to gloss over the intense focus on interracial homoeroticism (insofar as it is emanates from white males, at least) that is nearly omnipresent in Invisible Man. For what should be apparent to any reader of Ellison's novel is how deeply embedded it is in a Freudian hermeneutic-how profoundly shaped it is by an interpretive framework that views erotic desire as an essential motive force behind all social interactions. It is this dimension of the novel that I want to explore in this chapter-its carefully crafted and implicitly homophobic depiction of the libidinal motivations of white men who take a putatively altruistic interest in the lives of black men.

In the reading of Invisible Man I will put forward, the novel emerges as not unlike a series of case studies in white male psychology-a sustained meditation on the nature of the interest that various types of white man have taken at various times in the lives of black men. As it encapsulates several stages of African American history in the movement of its narrative, Invisible Man attempts to lay bare the psychological motivations of white men who played a significant role in each of those moments: Southern moderates who, like the townsmen depicted in the novel's first chapter, tolerated and even encouraged the program of black uplift promoted by Booker T. Washington and institutionalized at Tuskegee; Northern liberals who, like the character of Norton, provided indispensable financial support through their philanthropy for these endeavors; the bohemian patrons-allegorized in the novel in the figure of Young Emerson-who supported the Harlem Renaissance; and, finally, white Communists who-like their fictionalized counterparts, the members of the Brotherhood-sought to enlist blacks in their revolutionary struggle against capitalism. I examine the psychological portrait that Ellison offers of each of these types through the characters he uses to exemplify each of them. I will show how Ellison's inventory of white male "Negrotarians" underscores a psychic uniformity shared by them all-a uniformity that is revealed by the consistency with which they cloak within their benevolent actions an insidious and erotic intent.

What my reading will ultimately disclose in the novel is an underlying homophobic symbolism, one that verges on rendering all of these white male figures psychically indistinguishable. In suggesting that the optics of white male racial vision are fundamentally shaped by homoerotic impulses, Ellison depicts the predatory nature of racist desire as proximate-if not entirely equivalent-to homosexual desire. Latent in Invisible Man, in other words, is a version of the homophobic symbolism that links Ellison to the black nationalist writers of the sixties and seventies-a symbolism that renders homosocial racism equivalent to a kind of homosexuality. To demonstrate how close Invisible Man comes to making this symbolic equation I will examine an earlier version of the novel's pivotal eleventh chapter (in which the narrator is incarcerated in what seems to be a factory hospital). This excised chapter, as I will demonstrate, actually give the novel's representations of white masculinity an added level of aesthetic coherence by making of homosexual desire a disturbingly apt symbol for the desires that racist white men seek to satisfy in their dealings with black men.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Writing Manhood in Black and Yellowby Daniel Y. Kim Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804751099
• ISBN 13: 9780804751094
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 286
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile