Once you go black: Choice, desire, and the Black American intellectual

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 1-183

  Reid Pharr, Robert ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 84900129888     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (83)

1. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely (1845; reprint, New York: Norton, 1994).
2. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Frecerro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
3. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999).
4. Ralph Ellison, "Some Questions and Some Answers," in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972).
5. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10.
6. See Howard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
7. Gerald Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989).
8. See Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
9. See Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
10. See Robert F. Reid-Pharr, "Cosmopolitan, Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual," in Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 44-61.
11. See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
12. See especially Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America; Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990);
13. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; reprint, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994).
14. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).
15. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986).
16. John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1967). Hereafter cited in text.
17. The character of Margrit obviously references Richard Wright's friend and translator Margrit Sabloniere, whom Wright met in Holland and who was purported to be among Wright's closest friends when he died in 1960. See Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 510-513.
18. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
19. See James Sallis, Chester Himes: A Life (New York: Walker, 2000). The character also builds upon the figure of Leroy Haynes, a Black American GI who, Michel Fabre tells us, stayed in Paris after the war and with his French wife opened a restaurant that became an important meeting place for Black American expatriates. Strangely Fabre misses the well-known fact that Haynes's doppelganger, Gordon Heath, an actor and singer who opened an important "soul" café in Paris, did so with his male lover.
20. See Michel Fabre, Black American Writers in France: 1840-1980 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 165, 167.
21. I am trying to follow some of the clues left by Kenneth Warren, who writes of the emphasis on cultural politics within Black American intellectual life, "Scholars have been inclined to treat any recurrence as evidence that the truth about black political hopes and desires lies hidden within apparently nonpolitical activities. These studies though historical in intent, tend to freeze and generalize specific moments in the historical experience of Black people, and then to read the whole of that history through the lens of this crystallization." See Kenneth Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 33; emphasis mine.
22. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man and a Critical Look at His Work (New York: Amistad, 1988).
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 1977), 77.
24. Saunders Redding, review of The Long Dream, in Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, eds., Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993), 61.
25. Richard Wright, "The Literature of the Negro in the United States," in Richard Wright, White Man Listen! Lectures in Europe, 1950-1956 (New York: Harper, 1957), 74.
26. Quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 126.
27. Richard Wright, The Long Dream (Chatham, NJ: Chatham Bookseller, 1969). Hereafter cited in text.
28. George Eliot, review of Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp, in Elizabeth Ammons, ed., Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 43.
29. Sherley Anne Williams, "Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright," in Arnold Rampersad, ed., Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 65-66.
30. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," in Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 228.
31. The phrase is Michael Warner's. See Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
32. Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: Wiley, 2002).
33. Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
34. Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1999). Hereafter cited in text.
35. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture (1970; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1990), 148, 152.
36. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), xx.
37. Carla Capetti, "Sociology of Existence: Wright and the Chicago School of Sociology," in Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah, eds., Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives (New York: Amistad, 1993), 255-271.
38. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 304.
39. James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 22.
40. Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" Partisan Review 15 (June 1948): 664-671.
41. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
42. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
43. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
44. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
45. James Baldwin, Just above My Head (New York: Dial, 1979). Hereafter cited in text.
46. See Michael G. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
47. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993);
48. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
49. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
50. Quoted in James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991), 202.
51. See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1995). Notes to Chapter 4
52. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 5.
53. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" in Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
54. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 49-50.
55. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).
56. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; reprint, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 223-224.
57. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
58. Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Anchor, 1965), 39.
59. See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: the Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 214.
60. Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957).
61. Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979).
62. Excerpt from Nikki Giovanni, "The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts)," in Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement: Poems (New York: Morrow, 1979), 19-20.
63. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 38.
64. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 398.
65. Giovanni, "Seduction," in Black Feeling, 38.
66. See Imamu Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997);
67. Wallace, Black Macho; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1982);
68. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1984);
69. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1965);
70. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967);
71. Brown, A Taste of Power.
72. My thinking here owes much to Siobhan Somerville's wonderful thesis in Queering the Color Line that there is no essential disconnect within the American imagination or within the law around matters of race and sexuality. See Siobhan Somerville, Queer-ing the Color Line: Race and the Making of Homosexuality in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
73. Giovanni, "Of Liberation," in Black Feeling, 45.
74. Giovanni, "Woman Poem," in Black Feeling, 78.
75. Huey P. Newton, "The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements," in Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972).
76. For a good example of work that attempts to resuscitate a positive image of contemporary Black American nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a work that particularly stresses the human weaknesses of Huey Newton and rehearses again the fact of his criminality
77. see Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
78. See Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973);
79. Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972). Notes to Chapter 5
80. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
81. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 468.
82. See Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957).
83. Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" 471.