The child with a lion the utopia of interracial intimacy

GLQ

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 249-285

  Cutronc, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33751378707     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-6-2-249     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Ghost Body (1993, 20 min.) is a personal meditation on the ambivalences of interracial male homosexuality. Caressing black hands trace a white body. Poems, letters, and personal reminiscences evoke interracial encounters. Aimé Césaire conjures Robert Mapplethorpe's black male nudes in a poetic rendering of the word nigger. Angry letters from a black man to his white suitor disavow interracial love. Snow falls, and the wistful piano of Erik Salies enfantines sets the mood for Claude McKay's evening with a visiting "snow fairy." ID] (1995, 7 min.) is an elegiac reverie on images of interracial male homosexuality, enacting the imbrication of fantasy and memory. One brief scrap of home video is reflected in a scene from commercial porn, juxtaposed with lyrical imagery of floating autumn leaves, ludic recombinations structured by cyclical washes of electronic music. Imaging the sex of two male lovers, one black, one white, against three short poems by Holocaust survivor
2. Paul Celan, message from the messenger: three poems by Paul Celan (1996,17 min.) explores otherness and reconciliation through metaphor and the graphics of white and black. Composed of long takes in real time, looped and digitally processed, with a minimal, synthesized sound track of portentous rumble and crackling noise, the video invokes the wistful utopia of intimacy without "race" and sex without death.
3. Robert Reid-Pharr, "MIX: The Seventh New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film and Video Festival," FUSE 17, no. 2 (1993-94): 43.
4. Darieck Scott, "Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom," GLQ 1 (1994): 303, 318.
5. "The Utopia of the qualitative-the things which through their difference and uniqueness cannot be absorbed into the prevalent exchange relationships-lakes refuge under capitalism in the traits of fetishism" [In den Fetischcharakter flüchtet sich unterm Kapitalismus die Utopia des Qualitativen: was vermöge seiner Differenz und Einzigkeit nicht eingeht ins herrschende Tauschverhällnis] (Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971], 155,
6. Irans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [London: Verso, 1978], 120). Indeed, the activity of fetishism is substitution-exchange-as much as occlusion, fixing a generic attribute as irreducibly particular, obscuring the denied object of affection, and reifying the symbol, which becomes tantalizingly ubiquitous. Hence the "utopia" of the qualitative, which remains nowhere to be found.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Irans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973);
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Irans. Charles Lam Markmann (NewYork: Grove, 1967);
9. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, Irans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986);
10. André Breton, Nadja, Irans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1960);
11. Breton, Mad Loie, Irans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988);
12. Georges Bataille, "The Solar Anus" and "The Language of Flowers," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, Irans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
13. "Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. . . . Stringency and totality, the bourgeois intellectual ideals of necessity and generality, do indeed circumscribe the formula of history.... If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from the standpoint of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside-what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement. Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic"
14. (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150-51).
15. (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "Man and Animal," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Irans. John Gumming [New York: Continuum, 1982], 253).
16. Theodor W. Adorno, "George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence," in Prisms, Irans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 224.
17. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Irans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 198, 35.
18. Impression àfric [publication at the authors own expense]: "the sacred flame of genius / which makes the one chosen hy it so arrogant / that he finds the very stars in the sky pitiful / compared with the new star that bums upon his forehead [l'étoile au front]" (Raymond Roussel, Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique, canto 4, Irans. Andrew Hugill). And I have paid a certain price in writing and publishing this essay. Whatever the results or nature of the arrogance in writing "The Child with a Lion," it should not be confused with personal arrogance. Any expressive license necessary to conform to the inevitable stereotype-necessary for the immanent critique of the stereotype being attempted-distorts both the persons and the experiences represented in the text, not least of all my own.
19. "Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely" (Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," Irans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories [New York: Schocken, 1946], 370).
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Irans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 247.
21. Scolt, "Jungle Fever?" 318.
22. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms, 34.
23. "Humanity will be prey to a mythic anguish so long as phantasmagoria occupies a place in it" (Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century [Exposé of 1939]," in The Arcades Project, Irans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999], 15).
24. "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and Irans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155.
25. In the Lion's Den idth Anthony Hopkins, Tigress Productions for Meridian and Thirteen/ WNET, 1995; PBS Home Video, 1996.
26. Melvin Dixon, "Red Leaves," in Men on Men 2: Best New Gay Fiction, ed. George Stambolian (New York: New American Library, 1988), 295.
27. Aimé Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, Irans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smitli (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 146-47.
28. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109-10.
29. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Irans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 117.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Irans. Ibid., 116-17.
31. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
32. Poems of Paul Celan, Irans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1988), 234-35.
33. Poems of Paul Celan, Irans. Ibid., 344.
34. "During the day, angelic caresses hide in secret regions, adjacent to the poles" [Pendant le jour, les caresses angellqu.es se retirent dans les régions secrètes, l'oisines des pôles] (Max Ernst, The Hundred Headless Woman = La Femme 100 têtes [New York: Braziller, 1981], 70-71).
35. Poems of Paul Celan, 344-45.
36. Tennessee Williams, "Desire and the Black Masseur," in One Arm, and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1967), 94.
37. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 22-23, 349.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, "On Subject and Object," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchtfords, Irans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 257.
39. Mary J. Blige, "Everything," on Share My World, UNI/MCA compact disc, 1997.
40. Adomo, Minima Moralia, 164-65.
41. Reginald Shepherd, "Hygiene," unpublished version, c. 1997.
42. Reginald Shepherd, "Antibody," in Wrong (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 12.
43. Reginald Shepherd, "The Angel of Interruptions," in Angel, Interrupted (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 3.
44. Reginald Shepherd, "A Plague for Kit Marlowe," Angel, Interrupted ibid., 72.
45. Reginald Shepherd, "West Willow," Angel, Interrupted ibid., 92.
46. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 175-76.
47. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, Ibid., 16.
48. "He still hesitated a little; then he got up. He took one step. I could not move. . .. He remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. . . . He fell as gently as a tree falls" (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Irans. Katherine Woods [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943], 88-89).
49. "COME BACK! ALL IS FORGIVEN.-Like someone performing the giant swing on the horizontal bar, each boy spins for himself the wheel of fortune from which, sooner or later, the momentous lot shall fall. For only that which we knew or practiced at fifteen will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home. From forty-eight hours' exposure in those years, as in a caustic solution, the crystal of life's happiness forms" (Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street," in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, Irans. Edmund Jephcott [NewYork: Schocken, 1986], 64).
50. "Hatred of civilization is not only an irrational projection of personal psychological difficulties onto the world. The adolescent learns that the renunciation of instinctual urges expected from him are not adequately compensated, that, for instance, the sublimation of sexual goals required by civilization fails to obtain for him the material security in the name of which it is preached. . . . the conflict centers about the ideals for the sake of which renunciation is enforced. What fills the adolescent with distress is, above all, his dim and confused realization of the close connection or near-identity of reason, self, domination, and nature. He feels the gap between the ideals taught to him and the expectations that they arouse in him on the one hand, and the reality principle to which he is compelled to submit on the other.... The resistant individual will oppose any pragmatic attempt to reconcile the demands of truth and the irrationalities of existence. Rather than to sacrifice truth by conforming to prevailing standards, he will insist on expressing in his life as much truth as he can, both in theory and in practice. His will be a life of conflict; he must be ready to run the risk of utter loneliness. The irrational hostility that would incline him to project his inner difficulties upon the world is overcome by the passion to realize what his [parents] represented in his childish imagination, namely, truth.... He at least is successful in the process of internalization to the extent of turning against outside authority and the blind cult of so-called reality. He does not shrink from persistently confronting reality with truth, from unveiling the antagonism between ideals and actualities. His criticism itself, theoretical and practical, is a negative reassertion of the positive faith he had as a child"
51. (Max Horkheimer, "The Revolt of Nature," in Eclipse of Reason [New York: Oxford University Press, 1947], 111-13).
52. Raymond Roussel and Ron Padgett, Among the Blacks: Two Works (Bolinas, Calif.: Avenue B, 1988), 41.
53. Cesaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 126-27.
54. "Perhaps our true sexual act consists in this: in verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things.... There is without doubt a collective giddiness of escape into the obscenity of a pure and empty form, characterized simultaneously by the excessiveness of sex and its disqualification, as well as by the excessiveness and degradation of the visible" (Jean Baudrillard, L'Autre par lui-même [Paris: Galilée, 1987],
55. Irans. Bernard Schütze and Caroline Schütze, The Ecstasy of Communication [New York: Semiotext(e), 1988], 31-33).
56. Paul Eluard, "Comme deux gouttes d'eau," in Max Ernst, Une Semaine de bonté, Irans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1976), 179-80.
57. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109.
58. Breton, Mad Love, 90.
59. Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 67.
60. Breton, Mad Love, 7.
61. Breton, Mad Love, Ibid.
62. Breton, Mad Love, Ibid., 7-8.
63. Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 231.
64. Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, Ibid., 230-31.
65. His Name Is Alive, "Love's a Fish Eye," on Home Is in Your Head, 4AD compact disc, 1991.
66. Poems of Paul Celan, 344-45.
67. Paul Valéry, Euvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Pléiade), 966, Irans.
68. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1960), xi.
69. Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 62.
70. "It is clear that the world is purely parodie, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form. Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth. But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy"
71. (Bataille, "Solar Anus," 5).
72. ESP Summer, "Sticky Sun," on ESP Summer LP, Perdition Plastics compact disc, 1996.
73. For this and the preceding three block quotations see Bataille, "Solar Anus," 6-7: "A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why lie is not one of the others. In bed next to the girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms. Love, or infantile rage, or a provincial dowagers vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments. They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodie images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors. ... The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will rediscover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting. ... Movement is the figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory."
74. Lush, "Sweetness and Light," on Gala, 4AD/Reprise compact disc, 1990;
75. His Name Is Alive, "Darkest Dreams," on Liionia, 4AD compact disc, 1990.
76. His Name Is Alive, "Darkest Dreams."
77. "Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back" (SaintExupéry, The Little Prince, 93).
78. Paraphrased from Reginald Shepherd, "Coloring outside the Lines: An Essay at Definition," Callaloo 22 (1999): 139.
79. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12.
80. Elvis Presley, "Teddy Bear," written by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe.
81. Hegel, quoted in Adorno, Critical Models, 317 n. 3.
82. Poems of Paul Celan, 264-65.