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| ISBN-13: | 9780472904082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 660 KB |
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James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination
By Matt Brim
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 Matt BrimAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07234-7
CHAPTER 1
James Baldwin's Queer Utility
Black Gay Male Literary Tradition andGo Tell It on the Mountain
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.
— JAMES BALDWIN, THE DEVIL FINDS WORK
[W]e don't have many names for our radical dependence on the past, how it facilitates even our sharpest breaks with it.
— CHRISTOPHER NEALON, "QUEER TRADITION"
Once our traditions have been sullied, once they carry the taint of an all-too-modern homosexual funkiness, it becomes that much more apparent that we are continually in a process of choosing whether and how to continue those traditions.
— ROBERT REID-PHARR, ONCE YOU GO BLACK: DESIRE, CHOICE, AND BLACK MASCULINITY IN POST-WAR AMERICA
In the introduction, I prefaced the ways that James Baldwin has been alternately and distinctly situated within an African American literary canon and a gay literary canon. That "apparent" incommensurability has been created by strange bedfellows. In his 1991 discussion of the homophobic reception of Baldwin's fiction, Emmanuel Nelson argues, "Critically engaging Baldwin's fiction proves to be too much of a challenge for many white heterosexual critics, although there are notable exceptions. ... But to many the task of examining the perspective of a novelist who is both Black and gay is too taxing on their imaginative resources. ... Their reactions range from mild discomfort to shock, angry dismissal and hysteria, and studied silence." Nelson thoroughly documents the racialized homophobia present in white reviewers' assessments of Baldwin's fiction. White straight reviewers "seem generally comfortable with Baldwin's non-fiction prose [which rarely mentions the subject of homosexuality] but are often uncomfortable with his fiction [in which homosexuality is often present]." In other words, critics' negative homophobic reviews (including no review at all) effectively popularize and privilege Baldwin as an exclusively black mouthpiece. This occurs precisely to the extent that anti-racist, anti-homophobic "imaginative resources" fail them. Robert Reid-Pharr suggests another reason why homosexuality in Baldwin's fiction (and life) has gone un-reviewed by literary critics when compared to race, though he approaches the matter from the other direction. Gently parroting the critics, Reid-Pharr writes, "One must remember always that Baldwin is the black author, the paragon of the Black American intellect, the nation's prophet of racial tolerance, one whose queer sexuality presumably stands in such anomalous relation to his racial presence, intellectual and otherwise, that it works only as the exception proving the rule." The complex rationale at play here, according to Reid-Pharr, is that Baldwin's positioning as "the" black writer not only results from the critics' failure to pursue homosexual themes but also rests on their unwillingness to interrogate, as Baldwin would have them do, whiteness in relation to blackness. In this scenario, both whiteness and homosexuality become intangible through the insistence on Baldwin's black authorial presence.
While these twin, white critical disavowals, the first of Baldwin's homosexuality and the second of Baldwin's insights into the construction of whiteness, have perhaps resulted in the author's racialization as black, disavowals have also come from quarters of black literary and cultural criticism. I want to acknowledge that, like the white straight critics whom Nelson takes to task, black critics have sometimes exhibited the same homophobic reactions to Baldwin, "from mild discomfort to shock, angry dismissal and hysteria, and studied silence." But I want to turn to Sharon Patricia Holland's important analysis of African American literary tradition and its relationship to black gay writing to deepen the conversation about black critics' appropriation of black gay writers as (primarily or exclusively) black writers. In the fourth chapter of her book Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, Holland explicitly seeks to "foste[r] a procreative black imaginative terrain" that does not excise black gay subjectivity, including that found in her primary textual example, Randall Kenan's novel A Visitation of Spirits. Holland argues that one primary obstacle standing in the way of the reclamation of the novel's black gay presence is the African American social and literary critic's strong desire to solidify a black literary tradition. Just as such a tradition has been subverted by racist constructions of an "American" (read "white") national literature, African American critics' need for a tradition of "their own" quite often returns us to "territories where power is utilized in its most 'traditional' form." In both cases, homophobic exclusion becomes a tradition-defining strategy. But further, part of the difficulty in trying to situate black gay literature within a black literary tradition extends from the fact that "the word tradition, in the African American sense, encompasses all that is surely black and procreative." Black critics, privileging family narratives within the text and deploying genealogical tropes to set texts in relation to each other, thus reassert a traditional power structure by relying on a heterosexualized hermeneutics. Linking the need for an African American literary tradition to the larger field of play in which "tradition" reinscribes normative relations, Holland concludes that "the gay, lesbian, or bisexual (sub)text of critical and literary endeavors, and therefore the African American canon, is somehow treated as secondary to developing a literary project emphasizing its procreative aspects. The relegation of queer subjects to the unproductive end of black literary production places them in a liminal space. Such disinheriting from the procreative process contradicts a communal desire to bring back (all) black subjects from the dead, from the place of silence." While my extended treatment of the vexed relationship between race and procreation appears in chapter 4 of this book, I want to mark here the important links Holland makes between retrieving an African American literary genealogy and reclaiming procreative rights denied to African Americans under the many-layered system of American racism. Yet finding "no precedent" either in black literature or the lesbian and gay canon for Kenan's story of a black gay Southern youth's suicide and ghostly return, Holland looks to Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, where "the tradition unfolded itself in a queer configuration of black and white."
Despite the problems she identifies with "tradition," Holland resists jettisoning that critical framework, a decision that has several implications. Her reading attempts to signify off of the unwelcoming metaphors of heterosexual procreation in order to "embrace Kenan's novel as hopeful progeny in a long line of sons and daughters." Not only can we question the success of the resignification of familial metaphors in this context, but we can also consider the genealogical irony involved. The queer "progeny" exemplified by A Visitation of Spirits joins the "long line of sons and daughters" not through birth but through death, a highly suspect insinuation of queer blackness into familial history that seems more a rupture of that line than an integration into it. Standing against the hopefulness of Holland's formulation is her final realization that inclusion within the broader African American literary tradition requires of Kenan "the ultimate erasing of black subjectivity in order to actualize a queer project," for his black gay protagonist must resort to suicide in hopes that speaking from the dead will "force a community to see what it has left behind." Perhaps despite her critical motivations, then, Holland raises the possibility that black gay literature cannot be incorporated into the field of African American literature as long as the latter is framed as a "tradition." Assimilation into that "tradition" may require that black gay presence be made visible only through a concomitant rendering as invisible — in Kenan's case, a ghosting that results in the absent presence of his black gay protagonist. Against this absence, Holland reads Baldwin as making Kenan's narrative more present.
Holland's work offers a compelling example of a scholar's deep investment in reimagining her field of study — "the African American literary tradition, to which," she writes, "I had directed my life's work for the last ten years" — to include queer perspectives. My initial point, which may at first seem innocuous, is that Holland, like so many other readers, turns to Baldwin to facilitate that reconciliation. He functions as foundational to the architecture of two now mutually buttressing edifices, being both the conduit for reading black gay male writers into the larger African American literary tradition and, simultaneously, the cornerstone of the black gay literary tradition itself. The excellence of his writing and its unparalleled critical and popular success provide the internal logic that justifies and enables that positioning. A black tradition cannot ignore him, and a black gay tradition cannot exist without him.
In fact, neither of the preceding statements is indisputable. But Baldwin makes it seem as though they are. More precisely, Baldwin's critical positioning is now such that these statements have become, effectively, obvious. For this reason, Baldwin's work has achieved a broad and even pervasive critical utility for scholars, like Holland and myself, who work at the theoretical intersection of black queer studies. In this chapter, I will analyze the status Baldwin has achieved in black queer studies, not by questioning the sometimes problematic ways his work has been used to integrate black gay writing into the African American tradition but by interrogating the other, perhaps more obvious, use that has been made of him as the father figure of the black gay male literary tradition. As I have already suggested, even an essay such as Holland's that explicitly attends to the dangers of constructing literary traditions risks naturalizing Baldwin as the core of black gay writing. Rather than an isolated instance, this case can be made more generally: as black queer studies has variously identified the intersections, overlaps, and dependencies of black literary canons and gay literary canons, it has, as a consequence, also (re)constructed a black gay male literary tradition. Within that tradition, one pattern is unmistakable: critics and creative writers alike have conceptualized the work of black gay male writers by thinking, as though inevitably, through Baldwin. Yet, as Holland implicitly argues, we must question the power plays by which all traditions are constructed. If Baldwin has been made to anchor or organize a black gay male literary tradition, in what ways, perhaps unavoidably, has "power [been] utilized in its most 'traditional' form" in the creation of that tradition? Might we need to rethink how certain queer constructions paradoxically follow traditional ideologies? What might a black queer literary tradition look like, and what is Baldwin's place in it? In this chapter, I complicate Baldwin's pivotal positioning within black gay male writing by arguing that he operates, on the one hand, as the necessary central figure in the field and, on the other hand, as an unstable signifier of an always-rupturing tradition.
A NECESSARY REFERENCE
If it is nearly impossible to think of a black gay male literary tradition without thinking of and through James Baldwin, it is nevertheless quite possible to know the work of James Baldwin well — including his fiction, plays, essays, and his many interviews — without having almost any sense of the broader tradition that he has been made to anchor. In light of this asymmetry, I want first to reflect in some detail various moments in which Baldwin has been situated at the center of black gay male literature by other writers in that tradition, paying special attention to the metaphors used to conceptualize his centrality. An important volume of black gay male writing published in the spring of 1988, Other Countries: Black Gay Voices, contains the following dedication:
In celebration of their lives:
JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987)
RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT (1906–1987)
BAYARD RUSTIN (1912–1987)
The collection begins with an introduction by Colin Robinson, who edited this first volume of Other Countries along with Cary Alan Johnson and Terence Taylor. The introduction begins,
Welcome to a birth. In your hands is the latest addition to the small but growing canon of Black Gay Male literature, the new manchild in a family whose dead and living forefathers, brothers and cousins include B, BGM, Black and Queer (by Adrian Sanford), Blackbird and Eight Days a Week (by Larry Duplechan), Blackheart, Blacklight, Black/Out, Brothers, Change of Territory (by Melvin Dixon), Conditions and Earth Life (by Essex Hemphill), Diplomat, Habari-Daftari, In the Life, Moja: Black and Gay, Rafiki, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" (by Richard Bruce Nugent), Tongues Untied, Yemonja, and the many works of James Baldwin and Samuel Delany."
Performing the task of "birthing" a "new manchild" into the "family" of "forefathers," "brothers," and "cousins," the introduction ends by further metaphorizing Other Countries, describing it as "a vision" and "a difficult journey into new territory," as well as an "excavation of a past that has been lost, hidden, stolen." Building on this new/old framework, Robinson returns, in the end, to more familial metaphors to characterize the publication: "It is a [sic] homage to our forebears — like Richard Bruce Nugent and James Baldwin," "a pride in our immediate parentage in Blackheart," and a "legacy to go beyond [this] country."
In the lineage described by Robinson, Baldwin stands shoulder to shoulder with several other "forefathers," Richard Bruce Nugent and Bayard Rustin most notably, as the dedication in Other Countries makes clear. Nevertheless, Baldwin is more often represented as occupying a unique position, even in such intimate and elevated company. Nelson, writing in a legitimized, encyclopedic context, can thus repeat what has become a critical commonplace, that "[a]lthough [Baldwin] occupies an important place in African-American as well as gay American literatures, the significance of his life and work in the specific context of the black gay male literary tradition is immeasurable. He continues to be its defining figure." But even in the much more personal and idiosyncratic context of a blog, accomplished black gay experimental writer John Keene commits to the same basic argument, that although Baldwin is "the source of an ongoing 'agon'" for certain writers, "every Black gay male writer writes under the star (in all senses of that word) of Baldwin (and Hughes, and Nugent, and Cullen, etc.)." This interesting parenthetical both broadens the "stars" in the black gay literary firmament beyond Baldwin and suggests that perhaps Baldwin's star shines with a special light, illuminating the past, present, and future like no other black gay writer. Though he is "aware of [Baldwin's] literary failings and his personal imperfections," Keene maintains, "[F]or me, as for so many writers, [Baldwin remains] a towering and essential figure. He was, I should add, the spark that lit the fire that became the Dark Room Writers Collective, among other things, though his influence was also central to Other Countries and related [black queer] writing groups of the 1980s."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination by Matt Brim. Copyright © 2014 Matt Brim. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. James Baldwin Theory-Seeing the Invisible 1
Chapter 1 James Baldwin's Queer Utility: Black Gay Male Literary Tradition and Go Tell It on the Mountain 23
Chapter 2 Paradoxical Reading Practices: Giovanni's Room as Queer/Gay/Trans Novel 55
Chapter 3 What Straight Men Need: Gay Love in Another Country 92
Chapter 4 Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man 123
Conclusion. The Queer Imagination and the Gay Male Conundrum 152
Notes 177
Bibliography 195
Index 207