「不准叫我男孩！」：詹姆士‧鮑德溫《另一個國度》中之黑人國族主義、黑人男性情慾、與黑人男子氣概

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(1)⊕ 國立中山大學外國語文研究所碩士論文 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY. 「不准叫我男孩！」：詹姆士‧鮑德溫《另一個國度》中之黑人國族主義、黑人男性情慾、與黑人男子氣概 “Don’t Call Me Boy”: Black Nationalism, Black Male Sexuality, and Black Masculinity in James Baldwin’s Another Country. 研究生：許世展撰 BY: SHIH-CHAN HSU 指導教授：張淑麗教授 ADVISOR: PROFESSOR SHU-LI CHANG 中華民國九十六年一月 January, 2007.

(2) Acknowledgments. I here would like to extend my utmost gratitude to several people whose valuable help and support have brought this thesis into fruition.. First and foremost, my advisor, Professor. Shu-li Chang, aids me greatly in composing the thesis with her extraordinary advice, patience, and encouragement.. Professor Chang not only helps me think through the issues involved. in this research but provides me with her profound suggestions and revisions whenever I am in poor need.. Her full backups, whether intellectual or emotional, urge me to finish my. thesis within seven months.. I also want to thank the committee members, Professor Fu-jen. Chen and Professor Tsui-yu Lee, for their thorough reading of and insightful comments on this thesis. Besides, my pervasive debts are to Wen-dau Pan, the dean of Chung Cheng Junior High School, who has allowed me substantial convenience and advantages in teaching while I have to work on my thesis. My heartfelt thanks are also due to Wen-bin Chen, one of my colleagues at school, whose optimistic attitudes toward life and work help me get through lots of difficulties during these days. I am extremely indebted to my fiancée, Angel Chang, for her tolerance of my unceasing complaints, her handling of many trivialities, and her continuous companionship throughout the years of my intellectual pursuit.. Last but not. least, I would like to express wholehearted gratefulness to my dear family, especially my mother, all of whom have contributed to this thesis in an unconditional, supportive way. Their inspiring words do save me from those depressing moments and enable me to devote myself to this academic adventure..

(3) 論文名稱：「不准叫我男孩！」：詹姆士‧鮑德溫《另一個國度》中之黑人國族主義、黑人男性情慾、與黑人男子氣概校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文研究所畢業年度及提要別：九十五學年度第一學期碩士學位論文提要研究生：許世展指導教授：張淑麗教授. 論文提要：本論文嘗試分析非裔美國作家詹姆士‧鮑德溫在六０年代黑人國族主義、黑人男性情慾、與黑人男子氣概的繁複交錯之際，如何策略性地協商其種族與性別身份認同政治，並體現在其小說《另一個國度》中。筆者擬於本文第一章中提出，鮑德溫以其黑人同志作家的雙重（邊緣）身份，意欲藉該文本展演一種模稜兩可的敘事美學，亦即針對父權體制與異性戀霸權採取表面肯定、實則反覆質疑的敘事策略，進而揭露兩者之互為表裡，並顛覆性別與情慾疆界，最終重塑非裔美國黑人之男性氣質且落實種族正義。此敘事策略更與鮑德溫的身份認同概念互為呼應：身份認同恆為游移、不定、且多元決定的「變動過程」，而非始終如一的「固定實體」。究此，本文第二章將以非裔美國社會在六０年代風起雲湧的黑人國族運動與民權運動為主軸，深入探討非裔美國男性在強調種族本質與爭取種族自治之際，無（有）意間複製甚且強化了父權體制與異性戀霸權，形構了所謂「黑人超級男子氣概」（black super-masculinity）。本文第三至五章即以此為閱讀軸線，著重分析鮑德溫小說《另一個國度》中的五位男主人翁，冀能爬梳出作者獨特之敘事脈絡，以為挑戰此變相（向）對內壓迫之利器，並重組非裔美國黑人之男性氣質光譜。本文結論旨在強調，《另一個國度》絕非狂歡式的酷兒國度書寫，更非作者在種族議題上與白人霸權妥協甚至退讓。身處黑人國族主義、黑人男性情慾、與黑人男子氣概交錯的節點，鮑德溫勢必在種族與性別／情慾解放上取得平衡點，而小說《另一個國度》即為此平衡點的最佳詮釋之一。.

(4) Table of Contents. Abstract. Chapter One Introduction: Gendering the Black Nation…………………………………..1. Chapter Two Black Nationalism and the Black Macho Agenda………………………….14. Chapter Three Blackness and Sexual Paranoia in Another Country……………………….47. Chapter Four Whiteness and the Heterosexual Imperative in Another Country………….65. Chapter Five Queer Politics in Another Country………………………………………....88. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………....106. Works Cited …………………………………………………………………..111.

(5) Abstract This thesis aims to read James Baldwin’s Another Country to examine why and how he uses this novel to interrogate black nationalist discourses that inform the sexist and heterosexist biases in mid-century America.. I would argue that Baldwin, in writing this. novel, adopts an ambivalent narrative strategy both to ostensibly compromise on the heterosexual matrix politically and culturally scripted by black activists, and to critique the black hyperbolic masculinism endorsed and performed by them as itself a tragic consequence of white racism.. Whereas black nationalists carry the Black Macho agenda into practice to. redeem their manliness, Baldwin suspects that the heterosexist imperative of black machismo may end up infringing the rights of gender and sexual minorities.. I thus argue, in Chapter. One, that Baldwin writes Another Country to negotiate an oblique response to the conundrum he feels as both an artist and a black leader.. To explain how his conundrum takes shape, I. attempt in Chapter Two to lay bare the hegemonic masculinist ideologies embedded in anti-racist discourses. Drawing on this historical and theoretical investigation as my interpretive scaffold, I would in the following three chapters elaborate on how the novelist exemplifies his narrative technique via his male figures in Another Country.. In doing so,. Baldwin can, I would propose, assert that racial justice and sexual freedom must concur to effectuate blacks’ autonomy.. As such, I conclude my thesis by suggesting that Baldwin. never intends “another country” to be an idyllic landscape wherein Eric ostensibly plays out as a “sexual savior” and betters other characters’ self-recognition.. Another Country instead. illustrates a contested site where discourses on black nationalism, black male sexuality, and black masculinity come into a productive dialogism. Another Country, that is, can be best interpreted as Baldwin’s investigation into the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the sixties, and his consistent reformulation of individual identity as fluid, labile, and multiple..

(6) For my dearest parents, elder sister, and fiancée.

(7) Chapter One Introduction: Gendering the Black Nation. Caught in the midst of blacks’ civil rights movement in mid-century America, James Baldwin is noticeably ambivalent toward the mounting black machismo implicated in this politicized struggle for the supremacy of black cultural nationalism.. On the one hand, he. pitted against the continuing racial oppression exerted by whites; on the other hand, he has his reservations about the macho-oriented notion of Black Power.. Quite at odds with the. nationalist discourses wielded by leading black intellectuals of the sixties, he strives to address these controversial issues in his writings and lay bare the fact that racial identities are historical and cultural constructs marked by other conflicting, distorted ideological forces. More precisely, as an Afro-American gay writer, Baldwin also detects in the foundation of the nationalist discourses the polarization and naturalization of gender and sexual attributes. While anti-racism tops the priority of Black Power movement, it still demands alertness for the insidious operation of patriarchy and heterosexual matrix lest the twin structure turns black radicals into accomplices with the perpetual white hegemony.. Meanwhile, Baldwin. insists that a genuine commitment to the racial politics of black nationalist movements requires him to foreground and reconfigure black masculinity so that individual freedom, both racial and sexual, is augmented rather than curtailed.. Yet he was offered no stage to. articulate his gender-inflected racial politics owing to the anti-racist enthusiasm evinced by the black civil rights activists in the sixties. Instead, finding no direct outlet for his political conviction, the artist, in his literary works, especially those early ones, articulates sexual politics with a curious reticence and vacillation. A case in point is Baldwin’s third novel published in 1962, Another Country.1 Born in Harlem in 1924 as the eldest son of nine children, James Baldwin found 1. In this thesis, Another Country will be hereafter abbreviated as AC in parenthetical references..

(8) Hsu 2. himself surrounded by “an overlooked place where pain and deprivation were common” (Leeming 4).. In 1927, his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, remarried to David Baldwin, a. respectable clergyman who ironically earned no respect from James owing to his bitter subservience to white supremacy.. As the Baldwins’ economic condition worsened, David’s. paranoia escalated, leading to his loss of job, serious quarrels and tensions between generations, his mental breakdown in 1943, and, at last, his death by a fatal tuberculosis. Aside from strained relations with his stepfather, Jimmy the boy needed to aid his mother in the sustenance of this poverty-stricken family and resist the temptation to “give up” his life due to deteriorating racial and economic situations (Leeming 12).. At the age of fifteen, he. cultivated his eloquence by emerging as a promising preacher, a position which substantially prepared him for his upcoming writing career. Yet he stepped off the pulpit three years later, holding a firm belief that he was rather an upholder of the religion of “love” than “a believer in any sense which would make sense to any church [. . .]” (Baldwin, “Race, Hate” 48). These words mark his eternal separation from any ossified religious doctrines and institutions. By exiling himself to Paris from 1948 to 1957, Baldwin not only attempted an escape from the States where “death was not a danger [. . .]” but “a certainty” (Baldwin, “Conversation: Ida Lewis” 84).. He further embarked on his artistic adventure with Go Tell It on the. Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country, the last two of which explicitly touch upon white male homoeroticism2 and no doubt incited quite a little criticism among his contemporaries, black nationalists ad hoc.. For the radicals, to juxtapose a. redemptive white gayness (Eric Jones) with a deadly black homosexuality (Rufus Scott) in Another Country indubitably exaggerates private sufferings, while ignoring the atrocities. 2. Many critics have disputed over Baldwin’s intention to use whites to depict men’s love, particularly in Giovanni’s Room, where three protagonists are all cast as white males. Some affirm his artistic achievement by claiming that Baldwin has transcended over blacks’ issues into a concern for “the loss of the last American innocence” (Fiedler 149). At the other end of the polemic is a denigration of the author as a black self-hater who instead expresses “the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites” (Cleaver 124). In my thesis, I would propose that this is Baldwin’s strategy to demonstrate his identity politics while confronting “sexuated” black nationalist ideology..

(9) Hsu 3. committed against blacks in the public terrain. Racial concerns, at any rate, should count the first and foremost.. Baldwin, however, rejects this assumption.. emancipation sees no efficacy without sexual liberation.. In his view, racial. As such, he never ceased. publishing works which delve into the entwining of racism and sexism regardless of the derogatory label dubbed on him by his fellow blacks like “Martin Luther Queen,” nor is he affected when the white, rather condescendingly, call him “a sweet, exotic black boy who cries for mother love” (qtd. in Field 461).. As if deaf to the criticisms from both blacks and. whites, he still insists on interrogating the Black Macho agenda in Another Country. Moreover, if the 1962 fiction endeavors to sketch out the (im)possibility of interracial male homosexuality, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) and Just Above My Head (1979) are strenuous efforts to map out unexplored dimensions of black men’s sexuality.3 Yet it is noteworthy that Baldwin’s exploration of black male same-sex desire in his last two novels can be largely attributed to the attention aroused by gay rights movement and sexual radical activities after the Stonewall Riot in 1969.. Such an assuredness in extending the. spectrum of sexual orientations, however, found no practical or theoretical support in the decade from 1955 to 1965.. During the years when revolutionary fervor reached its apex and. black machismo got prioritized, consequently, it would be easy to imagine Baldwin’s conundrum as he is caught in between his artistic insistence to subvert the rigidity of race, gender, and sexuality, and his nationalistic inclination to overturn white supremacy.. 3. This. Many critics, like David Bergman, argue that Baldwin has gradually shifted his focus from sexual concerns to racial issues since approximately the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 because of Eldridge Cleaver’s indictment and other black critics’ repudiation against the (homo)sexual politics in Another Country. Yet I would contend that he never gives up (re)framing gender and sexual continuum within the racist dynamics of American society. The overt depiction of black male-male liaison in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Just Above My Head simply reveals his attempts to further question homophobia in black communities on the one hand and overturn white racism that always implicates the exclusion of the powerless, ethnic subgroups and sexual perverts no doubt included. And if these critics’ hypotheses on the author’s transition were tenable, it would be hard to imagine the following remarks he makes about sexual matters in an interview with Richard Goldstein in the year 1984: It is “a Western sickness,” “an artificial division,” “an infantile culture,” that makes male same-sex desire “such a big deal of it” (Baldwin, “Go the Way” 182). In this sense, Baldwin is consistent in expressing his conviction not only in his fictions and essays but before and after 1963, though he indeed needs an oblique writing technique to address these issues in Another Country. Such a narrative strategy is exactly the primary concern of my thesis. See Chapter 3 to 5 for detailed elaboration..

(10) Hsu 4. conundrum is precisely the point from which I intend to develop my thesis on his best-selling novel, Another Country. “Another Country, said Baldwin, is not pornographic; rather, it is an attempt to break through cowardly and hypocritical morality” (Leeming 200).. This novel is indeed the. writer’s provocative interrogation into the provincial mores that have caused racial and sexual injustice around him and his fellowmen.. Although the plot moves on chronologically as a. rule, the third-person narrator, by freely threading in and out of characters’ memories and mentalities, throws into relief the lasting impact of societal discrimination on individuals and their accompanying identity crises. At the core of the novel is an emphatic portrayal of three male protagonists: Rufus Scott, the first black gay character in Baldwin’s fictional world who dies pathetically at the outset on account of unresolved wounds from internalized racism and heterosexism; Eric Jones, a white bisexual southerner who, initially expelling himself to Paris when his love affair with Rufus goes sour, at length reunites with his lover, Yves, back in New York and seemingly opens the gate to “another country”; Daniel Vivaldo Moore, an Irish heterosexual who has been entrapped by a sense of guilt at Rufus’s death, which critically hampers his intimacy with Rufus’s sister, Ida Scott.4. The three men serve as. the main catalyst to motivate the other characters’ actions along the story line.. Richard. Silensky, a Polish immigrant and a mediocre writer compared with Vivaldo, is committed to a set of doctrinal family values and maintains a loveless marriage with his wife, Cass, an heiress to a New England aristocracy.. To revenge on white racism which results in her. brother’s death and strive for prominence in her singing career, Ida has an affaire de coeur with her agent, Steve Ellis.. At the expense of achieving uninhibited emotional intimacy. with Vivaldo, Ida finally recognizes that, with Ellis, she simply acts out self-degradation and 4. To label the three characters as practitioners of definite sexuality is due more to convenience than to substance. Baldwin has been maintaining that such categorization is pointless and really has “very little meaning” (“Race, Hate, Sex and Colour” 54). It should be noted that he intends not to evade the queries and reproaches for his homosexuality but to collapse those barriers that obstruct the multiplicity of sexual tendency. I would also in my thesis side with Baldwin and argue for his sexual dynamics..

(11) Hsu 5. internalized racism in a white male-dominated society.. Clarissa, renamed as Cass ever since. she wedded Richard, finds her marital life descending into stasis and spiritual barrenness.. A. sensual relationship with Eric, recuperative as it could be, nonetheless countervails not the least her fear and despair of losing her children and self-esteem.. Leona, a divorcée from the. South whose ex-husband claims her children, begins an affair with Rufus right after a casual encounter at a bar.. Seeking little tenderness in their interaction, however, she suffers instead. an unceasing round of vindictive abuse and at last becomes psychotic, a tragic finale that calls for more attention to this interracial and intergender relation. If this novel, as Baldwin maintains, fits into no category of erotica, it at least portrays his characters’ yearning for love in general and for racial and sexual identification in particular.. Or, at its maximum, it. demonstrates a black gay author’s efforts to confront and negotiate with the intricacy of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and black nationalism via his artistic expression. By and large, criticism on Another Country ranges from the condemnatory to the laudatory. Attacks against it mostly center around its author’s intensive focus on sexual liberty, male gayness in particular. Eldridge Cleaver, one of Baldwin’s contemporaries, is perhaps the most poignant and ruthless in denigrating this novel.. In his controversial Soul. on Ice, Cleaver disparages Baldwin’s fiction, especially the latter’s connotation of interracial intimacy between men, as a manifestation of “racial death-wish” and a “love of the white and hate of the black” (126 and passim, 130).. Rufus, for Cleaver, is a “pathetic wretch [. . .]. who let a white bisexual homosexual fuck him in the ass” (132).. Similarly, Robert A. Bone. thinks of this novel as “a dead end” owing to the writer’s exaggeration of “moment of sexual union” and his devotion to “sexual rebellion” (50, 51).. The consequence is simply “a. homosexual version of romantic love” on which Baldwin builds up a palace named “Pandemonium” (Bone 49).. By exposing Baldwin’s discontinuity in maneuvering essays. and fictions to treat race and sexuality respectively, Terry Rowden also argues that Another Country only makes sense in its “depiction of the goings-on among a self-consciously.

(12) Hsu 6. experimental group of [white] sexual radicals,” excluding black men as outsiders (43). Rufus can at best enact “racial scapegoating,” or “a kind of heterosexual dystopianism that will throw the homosexual utopia with which the novel ends into even brighter relief” (Rowden 41, 43).. In a word, these critics accuse the black writer of his overemphasis on. issues of sexuality which direly undermines his authority as a racial leader and his artistry. Acclaims for this fiction, on the other hand, find ventilation primarily through two avenues. The conventional one traces Baldwin’s idea/ideal of love elucidated in this novel, thereby shifting the focus from racism and heterosexism to a more universal plane. Lack of compassion, tolerance, and empathy, that is, can give rise to miseries of all individuals, be they white or black, heterosexual or homosexual. Donald B. Gibson, for instance, favors the assumption that the novelist minimizes racial concerns with “the primacy of love” (13), for Baldwin, Gibson contends, holds to liberal individualism.. Apparently, these critics. underlining the theme of love as a redemptive force view this novel from a liberal humanistic perspective and therefore more or less diminish Baldwin’s specific role both as a racial leader and a sexual radical in the fifties and sixties. The other critical reception of this fiction, thanks to the flourishing of queer theories and their conjunction with African American studies, expands and complicates the scope of the Baldwinian enterprise.. While still shedding light on the theme of love in Another. Country, these reviewers draw upon queer politics to probe into the ways in which the author ponders on and redefines what has been termed as “love.”. Attention is therefore paid to. Baldwin’s interrogation of compulsory heterosexuality through his illustrative male homoerotic love, bisexuality, or even the volatility of sexual identity.. Confirming the artist’s. endorsement of gayness, John S. Lash reads this novel as a manifestation of “modern phallicism” by which male-male intimacy can achieve “self-fulfillment” and “peace and security” (48).. To forward this thinking, Louis H. Pratt, in his James Baldwin, interprets. “love” as “run[ning] the full gamut of possibility, according to the needs of the individuals”.

(13) Hsu 7. (64).. Though perhaps lacking proper terminology, Pratt has attempted to explore Baldwin’s. notion of sexual identity in flux, a notion that later is quickly popularized in the Baldwinian critical industry.. This sort of interpretation inclines to see these abnormal desires as the. writer’s political gesture to transcend the institutionalized sexual norms, but his ambiguous attitudes toward such transcendence nevertheless calls for more explication.. In recognizing. the inextricability of racism and sexism and their interrelatedness with the prevailing black nationalist ideology during the civil rights movement, other critics prefer to read this novel as Baldwin’s tactics to tackle with his dilemma as he is caught in between privacy and publicity, between gayness and blackness, and between an art that demands indirect artistic insinuation and a nationalist politics that requires direct engagement.. Recent reviews on the fiction. privilege such overdetermined aspects, with William A. Cohen’s “Liberalism, Libido, Liberation: Baldwin’s Another Country” as a groundbreaking work.. Many critics like. Stefanie Dunning and Charles P. Toombs have followed Cohen to delve into the interweaving social and political forces impinged on the characters of this novel.. Such an investigation. urges Yasmin Y. Degout to underscore the significance of Baldwin’s aesthetics. Stressing the exclusive heterosexual-oriented portrayal of men or boys in Baldwin’s short stories and longer fictions like Another Country, Degout reads this narrative technique as a tactic to firstly “preclude the heterosexist reader’s desired distance from this ‘assault’ [male gayness]” (145).. Ultimately, such rhetorical strategy allows Baldwin to foreground the performativity. of gender and sexual categories and speak against their stereotypical dualism in homosexual practices and the American mythology of manhood.. Also accentuating Baldwin’s narration,. Mikko Tuhkanen borrows from the Freudian concept of (un)binding and highlights its correlation with (non)heterosexual narrative, thus proposing that Baldwin’s ambivalence toward some queer practices leads to this “perverse narrative” that observes more the pleasure principle than the reality one (555). Tuhkanen finally affirms the deviated narrative as the writer’s framing of “a collectivity based on nonviolent relationality” rather than violent.

(14) Hsu 8. exclusionary matrix (582). Kevin Ohi proposes an alternative reading to expose the “traumatic opacity” of every persona’s “incommunicable secret” (264), a secret which in effect stems from Rufus’s death.. For Ohi, Rufus, who perishes from agony over racism and. heterosexism, is the one that at once structures and ruptures Baldwin’s traumatic narrative wherein all individuals carry encrypted messages as to their racial and sexual identities.. Ohi. concludes that such “opacity of reading” helps excavate “the implicitly masculinist ideology underlying the celebration of identificatory unveiling [. . .] and the complicity of racism and homophobia through the more nuanced protocols of reading [. . .]” (280).. To sum up, since. the critics are increasingly aware that the black author is situated at the node of racial, sexual, and nationalist discourses, Another Country can be and must be seen as an artistic rejoinder to “the role of respectability and authenticity, the twin moral principles undergirding historical concepts of black cultural wholeness” (Ross 34).. By the same token, it no doubt requires. further elucidation of the correspondence—and probably interdependence—between identity politics Baldwin promotes and the textual politics he practices. In Emmanuel S. Nelson’s cogent words, “[w]ithout privileging his ethnicity over his sexuality [. . .] or his sexuality over his ethnicity [. . .] we have to explore the combined cultural, political, and artistic consequences of both” (“Critical Deviance” 91). Given Nelson’s reminder, Baldwin’s Another Country indeed calls for more queries into its interface between politics and poetics. At issue here is the author’s device to model Eric, a white gay, ostensibly as a sexual savior. Quite a few critics have suggested that such an interpretation5 seems to herald Eric’s emancipation from mandatory heterosexuality. 5. Roger Rosenblatt, in his discussion of Another Country, argues that Eric, “the new Adam,” embodies “the main liberating force of the story” with his homosexuality, “thus making a heaven of hell” (92-93). Gibson also locates Eric rather in “paradise” than in “hell,” proposing that “[h]is situation is idyllic” (12). Likewise, Lash lauds Eric as “the actual hero,” “the phallicist to whom men—and one woman—turn in their hours of bafflement and exaltation, the ministering angel [. . .] of the phallic god residual in the flesh of every man” (50). Though Lash, not unlike Gibson (13), rebukes Baldwin’s portrayal of Eric as “necessarily submerge[ing] race into sex” (53), it is indisputable that he basically reads Eric as a redemptive hope. Despite his recognition of Baldwin’s “revolutionary sexual message” that signifies little advocacy of homosexuality but rather a “complete destruction of supremist barriers of any type,” Lorelei Cederstrom still reads Eric as a magic character who delivers to Vivaldo “an intimation of true love” (183-84). These interpretations, I would rather contend,.

(15) Hsu 9. And Eric’s sexual freedom, at first glance, enables Cass to recognize her displaced desire in their liaison and Vivaldo to accept his repressed homoerotic propensity for Rufus.. We may. wonder, however, why Baldwin, an Afro-American writer, “needs to” sentence Rufus to death while ostensibly legitimizing Eric as a redemptive figure.. That is, why does the black. author privilege a white homosexual as the priest and guardian for his Eden while packaging his black gay protagonist into suicide at the onset?6. Cohen raises a similar question in his. essay, explaining that the mounting black activism in the sixties forces Baldwin to voice his integrationist inclination toward racial concord only in terms of sexuality. The exclusive focus on intimate matters, in other words, makes it possible to “transcend social barriers” (Cohen 216) and tear asunder the boundaries between races. Persuasive as this reasoning goes, I would still make a further inquiry of why the novelist disqualifies Rufus as his representative in case sexuality serves as his only leverage. More precisely, if personal passion functions well to overcome strict categorical placement and rectify racial inequality, why not let Rufus play such a crucial role?. At the end of his essay, Cohen partially answers. this question by noting Baldwin’s impasse—and inability at last—to represent and sustain a gay black subject in his story, a controversial persona which will be easily associated with its creator.. To be at once black and homosexual would be to “find oneself impelled. contradictorily by both individual volition and social forces” (Cohen 218). Cohen finally pities Baldwin for remaining “within a liberal humanist ideology” (218). This proposition intrigues me in two facets: first of all, what are exactly those “social forces” that constitute the black writer’s consciousness and thwart his revolts against social restraints?. Secondly,. overemphasize Eric’s transgression of sexual and gender barriers on the one hand and overlook Baldwin’s ambition to challenge racism and (hetero)sexism on the other. To be brief, Eric cannot be simplified and idealized as a “sexual savior.” Some critics also dispute against this sort of extolment of Eric. See the following essays for further reference: Tuhkanen, 579-80; Ohi, 273; and Bryan R. Washington, 141-42. 6 This is also why Giovanni’s Room incites critics’ heated debates on its “whitewashedness”: No colored character appears in the story. If the novella incurs queries about Baldwin’s explicit treatment of white gayness, little doubt that Another Country, by including race (Rufus) in this controversial subject matter, confuses its reader and triggers more fierce contentions over Baldwin’s political position, racial and sexual, among both black and white audience..

(16) Hsu 10. does Baldwin, by silencing a black gay character, really compromise on his sexual politics with these strangling “social forces”?. In effect, to maintain that Baldwin comes to terms. with anti-gayness clashes not merely with his delicate exaltation of male intimacy in Another Country but with his demythologization of monolithic sexuality in his prose.7 is always suspicious to regard Eric as a redemptive hero.. Meanwhile, it. His sexual encountering with Cass. and Vivaldo rarely promises their full self-awareness and self-acceptance.. While. romantically depicting Eric’s copulation with Vivaldo, Baldwin obfuscates Cass and Eric’s affair by strangely removing the sensual scenario from depictions of their intimacy.. He even. translates it into a mythical mother-son relationship, a stereotypical transcription—and probably an insinuated critique against such transcription—of gay men’s obsession with maternal figures (AC 201-02). As Bryan R. Washington notes, Eric’s love affair with Cass “is overdetermined—at once explicitly heterosexual, implicitly homosexual, and suggestively incestuous” (142, emphasis added). Likewise, Vivaldo hardly follows the lead of Eric’s sexual practice after their apocalyptic sexual encounter, but instead seeks to recuperate a “normal”—and yet precarious—connection with Ida: “‘You [Ida] seem to forget that I love you’” (AC 431). The novelist’s unusual tactic to call prescriptive gender and sexual identity into question still cannot be glossed over. In the meantime, the reunion between Eric and Yves at the end of the story does not in the least suggest his optimism toward a male homoerotic Eden: “Something terrible is going to happen to him. [. . .] I was bitter.. Yves comes and he is not prepared.. I could not understand how [the critics] could see that as a happy ending”. (qtd. in Tuhkanen 575). Cohen’s lamentation that Baldwin is still incarcerated in liberal. 7. Although Baldwin indeed relies mostly on essays to expound his thoughts on race while adopting fictive forms to elaborate on his reconceptualization of gender and sexuality, some thought-provoking essays and interviews still reveal his deep concerns for the private issues and their interrelatedness with racial matters. See, for example, his essays like “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” (This article has been retitled as “Here Be Dragons” in another version of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket), and “The Male Prison.” Also see such interviews as conducted by Ida Lewis, James Mossman , Richard Goldstein, and Quincy Troupe, for further reference..

(17) Hsu 11. humanism implies his postulation that Baldwin conjures up little space for at once blackness and gayness.. That is, the “another country,” for Cohen, welcomes not Rufus, who is. unrepresentable due to his doubly marginalized status (colored and homosexual), but rather Eric, who is privileged to transgress sexual and racial boundaries and escort other figures into salvation. Since Baldwin intends no pleasing denouement for this novel, Eric will surely teeter on the brink of his perilous intimacy with Yves, thereby countering against Cohen’s assumption.. In this logic, why does the artist, we would forward our question, put himself. in an equivocal place and portray Eric so ambiguously?. It is understandable that Rufus fails. to speak for the author according to Cohen’s reasoning, but is it also comprehensible that Eric, presumably the author’s mouthpiece, unravels nothing but a misty conception of race and sexuality?. Or is it rather the novelist’s strategic aesthetics which, by virtue of incessant. queries, challenges ossified identity politics both in the private and the public terrains? What would be Eric’s significance in this novel if he cannot represent “a kind of sexually and racially postlapsarian utopianism” (Kaplan 30)?. And would it be also tenable to suggest. that such poetics of confusion and oscillation is directly relevant to our understanding of the intricate tension between Baldwin the artist and the black nationalist projects?. Finally, can. this fiction be read as a manifesto of sexual and racial utopia? It would be incomplete to interpret Baldwin’s Another Country without considering its historical specificity, i.e. the burgeoning black nationalist and black power movements, whose advocates struggle for racial dignity and authenticity while (un)consciously imposing gender and sexual norms on black subjects.. As a result, I devote the second chapter of my. thesis to a study of the nationalist discourses that flourished in the United States during the late fifties and early sixties.. Having dismissed the civil rights movement as ineffective and. impractical, black activists took up more aggressive, separatist posture to defy white supremacy and implement racial justice.. Implicated in this defiance, however, is in fact a. reinscription of the patriarchal and heterosexual rhetoric of the white oppressors.. Gender.

(18) Hsu 12. asymmetry revalorizes compulsory masculinity, and sexual normativity further channels manhood into a monolithic construct. As a black gay artist, Baldwin must have been aware of such conspiracy, and he needs to confront the dilemma about what constitutes his priority: his exploration of polymorphous masculinities or his support for the Black Nation.. It is this. very impasse, I would argue, that catalyzes the author’s aesthetics of ambivalence, an ambivalent narrative strategy that both critiques the heterosexual matrix of the black cultural nationalism and exposes the black manhood endorsed and performed by radical black men as itself a tragic consequence of white racism. Drawing on this historical and theoretical investigation as my interpretive scaffold, I would in the following three chapters elaborate on how the novelist exemplifies his narrative technique via zooming in on his male figures in Another Country.. Chapter Three focuses on the portraiture of Rufus, a portraiture that,. while ostensibly resonating with heterosexist and hypermasculinist ideology, in fact makes a detour to denunciate these imperatives and establish a revisionary gender and sexual enterprise. This revisionary gesture manifests itself more straightforwardly when white men are anatomized.. Chapter Four thus highlights three white male characters, Ellis, Richard,. and Vivaldo, who embody white masculinism and illustrate its impasse which can never be replicated in blacks’ anti-racist agenda.. I would propose that this is Baldwin’s another. circuitous measure to resist and question normative gender and sexuality. Inasmuch as Rufus is liable to marginalization due to his blackness and gayness, Eric, unlike other white masculinists, emerges as a protagonist with potentials for racial and sexual liberation. Chapter Five, therefore, dissects the queer politics enacted by Eric.. At the same time, I. attempt to lay bare the novelist’s discretion in bestowing liberating forces on the white protagonist.. This discreet act not merely echoes Baldwin’s perpetual queries of the. normativization of individual identity but helps consolidate his position as a “race man” and reinforce his espousal of the polyvalence of sexuality and masculinity.. The above. discussions lead me to conclude that “another country” cannot be simply interpreted as an.

(19) Hsu 13. idyllic landscape wherein Eric plays out as a “sexual savior.” It is instead a contested site in which discourses on black nationalism, black male sexuality, and black masculinity come into a thought-provoking dialogism.. As such, Another Country can be best read as Baldwin’s. denunciation of stereotypification and his insistence on the reformulation of racial and sexual identities as fluid, labile, and multiple..

(20) Hsu 14. Chapter Two Black Nationalism and the Black Macho Agenda. Nationalism [. . .] assigned everyone his place in life, man and woman, normal and abnormal, native and foreigner; any confusion between these categories threatened chaos and loss of control. —George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality Free countries equated with free men, domination with castration, the loss of manhood, and rape [. . .]. —bell hooks, Yearning. I. Black Nationalist Movements and Discourses in the Sixties’ America The logic of nationalism consists in concurrent differentiation and assimilation.. To. assure that the idea of a nation, cultural or racial, retains validity and remains unquestioned, nationalists must construct and crystallize a set of social customs and traditional values as rules and heritage shared by their fellowmen.. This commonality in values system and. behavioral paradigms, though rather imagined and cathected than materialized by members of a nation (Anderson 6), signals a compulsive means of inclusion and exclusion within the group.. In other words, the centripetal force of nationalist discourses erases individual. differences and demands subjects to conjure up “a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7).. The “nation,” therefore, forcedly—and fancifully—displaces race, gender, sexuality, and. ethnicity as the only categorical marker.. The inception of nationalism would transpose the. dominator’s suppressing mechanism unto other minorities of the new-born nation. It also suggests the diminution and even demolition of the multiple identities of individuals, especially in relation to private concerns like gender and sexuality.. In a nationalistic context,. the political has to outweigh the personal. In the interest of the nation, these personal.

(21) Hsu 15. matters are often cited only to consolidate the power dynamics of nationalist discourses since every man and woman needs to be allocated to a normative and fixated place to stabilize and reinstitute a political entity.. That is to say, the twin force of patriarchy and heterosexism. comes into full play when it facilitates the nation-building project. gender and sexual orientation thus emerge.. Dichotomies as to one’s. Any transgression of these ossified borders, as. George Mosse comments, is taken as an attempt to challenge and collapse the legitimacy of such a nascent political unit. Black nationalism8 in America during the sixties staged precisely this scenario.. In. this chapter, I would look into this specific moment when Black Power competed with earlier civil rights movements and superseded them in the end.. In an effort to authenticate. blackness under white hegemony, black radicals resorted to African and Afro-American traditions to exalt racial purity and black beauty. At issue is that while it is undeniable that black revolutionaries assumed more aggressive postures to redress the ineffectiveness of civil rights struggles, we cannot ignore their complicity with sexist/homophobic discourses to reinstate compulsory masculinity and regulate sexual practices.. Conventional familial. values are also reaffirmed to solidify heterosexual matrix and the imperative of reproduction. Capitalism and mass media further helps reinforce this doctrinal logic in the postwar American society. My investigation into the black nationalist movements of the sixties actually aims to take issue with the strangling sexual politics imposed upon Afro-American men by black radicals themselves.. Insofar as Baldwin has consistently concerned the. problematics of black masculinity throughout his oeuvre, an in-depth study of the historical and cultural reconfiguration of black manhood, I would maintain, will enable us to better understand why he always asserts that the dismantling of white racism entails the liberation, 8. I use “black nationalism” to refer more broadly to those rebellious thoughts and acts ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panther Party founded later in 1966. Whereas the latter took more leftist route than the former, both of them issued suspicion of and disparagement against their antecedent civil rights struggles. It is not difficult, therefore, to infer that these uprising actions were imbued with masculinist ideology propagandized by nationalists..

(22) Hsu 16. rather than the oppression and repression, of Afro-Americans’ sexual rights. The early sixties in the United States dated the downfall of the integrationist politics upheld by initial civil rights leaders. Derogatory sexual and gender tropes were even used to upbraid the leaders for political effeminacy. In actuality, the Nation of Islam (NOI), an organization developed by Elijah Muhammad and amplified by Malcolm X, had in the late fifties exposed the inadequacy of this mild “struggle to reconcile black and white into a single egalitarian national culture” (Ross 21).. Proponents of the NOI disavowed the racial politics. of the integrationists largely due to the latter’s association with Christianity, which ultimately subjected blacks to “indignities” and “transformed [them] into self-effacing, patient, pious, forgiving Uncle Toms” (Robinson 39).. Such an obedient black image fails the younger. generation’s expectation not only because it insidiously props up white regime but because it deprives the blacks of their cultural and racial identity.. Put simply, the radicals launch their. vociferous attacks against both whites and their “effeminate” Afro-American predecessors like Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin, among many others.. For. them, these forerunners of the civil rights movements take up a stance that is too conservative and passive to achieve racial justice.. With the increasing demand for self-identity and. self-determination, the submissive image of the “Uncle Tom” delineated by Wright dwindled into the background, and the civil rights struggle led by King also lost favor with the militants. King, as Michele Wallace astutely points out, even became “a glaring impossibility—a dream of masculine softness and beauty, an almost feminine man [. . .]” (37).. Ironically, even. though King himself was taunted as a “feminine man,” he still refused to appear together with Baldwin on a television program in part because Baldwin “was uninformed regarding his [King’s] movement” (qtd. in Field 460) and in part because Baldwin’s “abnormal” sexual predilection may impair King’s racial leadership. It should be noted, however, that Baldwin had then in fact involved himself with the civil rights activities by joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

(23) Hsu 17. (Leeming 175).. Yet his active participation in sit-in demonstrations and student protests did. not dilute the public’s attention to his homosexuality, nor did it thus privilege him as a persuasive, authoritative spokesman for his race and a populist among the integrationists. As a result, it can be inferred, that in the sixties any affiliation with assimilationist stance became a lot more intolerable and inexcusable as far as black liberation was concerned.. But. we need to realize that, despite the lethargy and inefficacy of blacks’ earlier resistance, white racists were quick to discern the subversive forces of Black Power and therefore took resolute legislative measures to g[i]ve blacks the right to vote and nothing to vote for, the right to buy but no money to buy with, the right to go wherever they wanted but no transportation to get there.. And lastly [they] told the black man to keep his penis tucked. between his legs or there would be nothing at all. (Wallace 72) It is easy for the oppressed to detect the superficiality and irrelevance of these concessions made by the white racist politicians. The white’s purported gestures displayed not so much the will to emancipate as the ploy to incarcerate black men and undermine their political power (and sexual potency), which is seen by the oppressor as a threat. Incensed by the sluggish improvement in racial justice and angered with the acquiescence adopted by their forebears and the conservative black bourgeoisie, black revolutionaries would prefer more belligerent and assertive means to elevate their race to the pedestal of authority.9 Not surprisingly, the “modern” black nationalist movements zero in on the retrieval of African and Afro-American traditions, their economic and political independence, their 9. Not all black activists in the tumultuous sixties demonstrated destructive force to rip off the white dominance. Some aggressive polities like the NOI did condemn the nonviolent tactics of the integrationists, but they undeniably held to abstract and moderate strategies when compared with the Black Panther Party. Elijah Muhammad, for instance, “mixed Horatio Alger themes of uplift, racial determinism, and gender subordination, with an apolitical millenarianism” (Robinson 35). His lack of intensive engagement with black liberation may partly cause his eventual separation from his successor, Malcolm X. And, interestingly, even Malcolm X himself “encouraged armed self-defense, not armed offense” (Robinson 47). To be simple, members of the NOI, unlike the Panthers, took on more reactionary stance to resist whites’ segregation. That Malcolm X was rendered as an icon of warrior in the Black Power era results mainly from his being appropriated by more militant nationalists. See particularly Robinson, 34-50, for detailed discussion on this point..

(24) Hsu 18. spiritual self-determinacy, and their mythological militant spirits.. Elijah Muhammad’s. remarks in his first encounter with Malcolm X well demonstrate these appeals: In case the black man is downgraded as “Original Man” who has been divested of language, culture, and kinship, now he has to know himself enough to straighten up from “the bottom of the white man’s society” and return “where he had begun, at the top of civilization” (Malcolm X, Autobiography 294).. These declarative words illustrate Muhammad’s advocacy of blacks’. primitivism, autonomy, and cultural advancement as opposed to whites’ dominance. If the colonial power exercised by the white racist never intends to liberate black people from “a colony” they have formed in America, they must stop the “institutional racism” all on their own (Carmichael and Hamilton 5).. No expedient can be more confrontational and efficient. than bellicosity, according to black militants. Even SNCC and CORE also steered toward this direction.. Though originally more conservative, the two civil rights organizations had. begun to interrogate the efficacy of interracial collaboration since the mid-sixties and at last adjusted themselves to a separatist posture to restore black autonomy (Robinson 63-65).. To. exterminate the inferiority complex that has weakened black people ever since slavery and to redefine “blackness” as positiveness and constructiveness, Black Power activists required more viable and progressive remedies than the professed cooperation between races. Hence we can easily see why Maulana Ron Karenga is so intent on reconfiguring African identity and tradition when he founded US Organizations in Los Angeles in 1965.. Guerrilla warfare. which characterized Max Stanford’s the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and set its final goal to topple the American government becomes comprehensible as well.. The Black. Panther Party, organized by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in October 1966, precisely exemplified blacks’ resolution to brandish weapons to strive for their civil rights. SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael aptly delineates the black panther as a bold, beautiful animal, representing the strength and dignity of the black demands today.. A man needs a black panther on his side when he and his.

(25) Hsu 19. family must endure loss of job, eviction, starvation, and sometimes death, for political activity.. He may also need a gun, and SNCC reaffirms the right of. black men everywhere to defend themselves if threatened or attacked. (qtd. in Doss 486) Although Carmichael’s silhouetting of the black panther reveals his inclination to legitimize blacks’ appeal to armed militancy as a defensive move, it still marks the Panthers’ belief in self-assertion and self-reliance, a belief which triggers rebellious and offensive actions that follow.. In truth, the combative black image reminds us of the “field Negro” with whom. Malcolm X identifies himself. endeavors to sabotage it.10. The field Negro cares nothing about his master’s interest but. To distance himself from the obsequiousness of assimilationists,. Malcolm X portrays a Negro man who is always prompt to fight back whenever under threat or attack. Whereas the pious Uncle Tom tends to compromise with white mainstream culture, the field Negro and the Panthers never hesitate to jettison and overturn it once their rights, life, or cultural identity is menaced or demolished.. No longer would black men. remain politically negotiable and essentially incompetent. Bellicosity and virility, instead, initiate them into a real manhood. Significantly, Carmichael’s delineation of the black panther can be summed up as a reconstitution of manhood for colored men.. First of all, the above lengthy quote spotlights. men rather than their female counterparts. It emphasizes the black man as the only protagonist to dramatize the nationalistic script, thereby equipping him with the confidence and competence to regain control over himself and his properties—his family surely included. Women are given relatively little importance to carry this project into effect.. Paternalism, as. a result, plays a decisive role in filtering out participants in terms of their sex and gender. 10. Malcolm X distinguishes the field Negro from the house Negro, “who lived right up next to his master—in the attic or in the basement. He ate the same food as his master and wore his same clothes. And he could talk just like his master—good diction” (Malcolm X 63). It would be not difficult to discern in this sarcastic remark that Malcolm X worries about the loss of black tradition and language once the house Negro predominates in black communities..

(26) Hsu 20. Moreover, the “bold, beautiful animal” suggests at once primitivism in relation to African ancestries and the “black is beauty” rhetoric espoused by black progressives. direct maneuver of brutal forces can frighten whites away.. For them, a. But such a maneuver can be. easily ascribed by white racists to the essential barbarism as which Afro-Americans have been labeled and stigmatized.. Even so, a black militant, though possibly jeopardizing his. work and the lives of his family owing to his involvement with revolutionary acts, still obtains the pride and power to lead his family into the anti-racist camp.. In short, in highly. regarding this animalism found in their African pedigree, the Panthers intend to reactivate it as a behavioral paradigm for black men so as to regain their black machismo.. Contrary to. King’s proclamation that blacks should be also “citizen-subjects” in a pseudo-democratic society, the Panthers aim rather at “reconfiguring and romanticizing them [black men] as the very embodiment of revolutionary rage, defiance, and misogyny” (Doss 489). “Yes, yes,” Wallace writes about Black Macho, “he wanted freedom, equality, all of that. But what he really wanted was to be a man” (30, emphasis added).. In his Soul on Ice,. Eldridge Cleaver also exclaims that “[w]e shall have our manhood” (84). How to be a “manly” man, aside from anti-segregation, is immediately accentuated in black nationalistic discourses, and the Black Power movement, with its aggressiveness and pugnacity, offers a set of guidelines to assist young activists in their “pursuit of manhood” (Wallace 33). Considering the omnipresence of white hegemony, however, these militant organizations, rebuked as disturbers of peace, would certainly undergo the surveillance of the States’ intelligence, and failure of their agenda was pitiful but never accidental (Robinson 52).. The. newspapers’ ink even stained the “field” Negro with such biased dubbing as “‘Hate-teachers’ . . . ‘violence-seekers’ . . . ‘black racists’ . . . ‘black fascists’ . . . ‘anti-Christian’ . . . ‘possibly Communist-inspire . . .’” (Malcolm X, Autobiography 340). Despite intimidation, incarceration, or eradication by governmental agencies and media, however, black activists nonetheless blueprinted their programs to elevate blacks’ status quo.

(27) Hsu 21. and, more essentially, reconstruct black manhood. Cheryl Clarke has put it well that “[i]n order to participate in this [Black Power] movement one had to be black (of course), be male-oriented, and embrace a spectrum of black nationalist, separatist, Pan Africanist sentiments, beliefs, and goals” (198, emphasis added).. Charles P. Toombs also notes that. “black men have had to prove that they were human, that they were not ‘boys’ and ‘uncles,’ and, after the Civil War, that they were entitled to full citizenship rights” (109, emphasis added).. As much as the founding of a black nation is predicated on male orientation, a. definite demarcation of manliness turns out to be a sine qua non in (re)producing fitting male subjects.. Since slavery, a black man had been stripped of his mentality, mobility, material. possessions, and authority in familial structures, all of which are equated with his black bravado.. For him, whites’ lynching, expropriation and debilitation indicate literal castration. and figurative emasculation.. As a result, the recovery from inferior and exploited. conditions signifies the resurrection of manhood.. If King and Bayard Rustin, another leader. of the civil rights struggles, emblematize the New Uncle Toms whose reconciliatory tenets bring forth passive resistance and invoke at best an effeminate male image, black revolutionaries appeal to “the panther” and “the gun” to create a sturdy, uncompromising man who can reclaim the command over himself and his family, and, by extension, sovereignty over his country.. Conversely, as bell hooks’ words in my epigraph imply, the establishment. of free nations symbolizes the attainment of assertive masculinity.. Black nationalist. movements, so to speak, subtly align with the reconstitution of black machismo.. II. The Black Macho Agenda To strive to re-image a virile manhood, black nationalists require more strategies than the rhetoric of violence. Foci on familial structure and values simply suit their purpose. The aforementioned has testified that a black man can be figured as an authoritative master by re-administering his household. Once straightening himself up from a state of.

(28) Hsu 22. subordination, he needs not endure powerlessness imposed by whites any more.. Yet it is. noteworthy that this sort of nuclear family in fact epitomizes essentialized and normativized kinship. offspring.. Namely, it is a social unit comprised exclusively of a father, a mother, and their The specified membership within this institutionalized space thus registers three. primary, indispensable logics: patriarchy, reproductivity, and heterosexuality. Let me begin with the logic of patriarchal structure.. If the black man assumes a. domineering role in his household, his wife is supposed to impersonate a supporting character in the nationalistic stage. During slavery, however, black women inadvertently occupied a more prominent and commanding place in a domestic sphere.. Their husbands experienced. destitution and despondency precisely because white masters intended to emasculate black men and browbeat them into servility. Black women were no doubt threatened by the master’s sexual violence. Diana Fuss has reminded us that this brutal act was actually “imbricated in an entire economic and political system in which the rape of black women by white settlers (or ‘colons’) works to establish and maintain what is, in effect, a slave economy” (“Interior Colonies” 31-32).. The inability to prevent black women from whites’. assault indirectly aggravates the colored male’s racial paranoia and debilitates his manhood. But the black female was immune to dehumanization that plagued her man partly owing to her relative lack of a “risk” which may intimidate white men and partly owing to her being often relegated to domesticity.. As contrasted with her male counterpart, she comforted the. slaveholder and capitalist employer with such servile precepts as reliance, obedience, and faith (Mercer and Julien 113).. Handling household affairs and looking after her offspring. and her defeated man rendered her relatively influential in a black family.. In literary. representation and historical documentation we can easily locate the “almighty” Nanny and the “crippled” man depicted here.11 11. Put another way, the black man went through symbolic. Toni Morrison, for instance, in her Beloved presents us with such characterization. Sethe, the female protagonist, is at once a caring mother who tackles a fallen household and pampers her dead daughter, Beloved, and an Amazonian woman who dares to slay Beloved to protect her from the brutality of racism. Baby Suggs,.

(29) Hsu 23. castration caused by slavery and matriarchy at once.. It is indeed undeniable that black. wives never intend to hamstring their spouses, but it is also incontrovertible that the emasculation that men suffer in the private domain is exactly contingent upon the slavery system in the public arena.. Slavery, in other words, rips off a black man’s authority in his. household at the same time that it hampers his access to masculinity in a political landscape dominated by white men.. The Moynihan report exacerbates this condition by stigmatizing. the maternalism in the black families as “abnormal” (qtd. in Wallace 31), an abnormality that features black women’s advantageous state in education, employment, and professional trainings over their racial and, more importantly, sexual counterparts.. To be brief, this. “‘terrible mother’ [. . .] emasculates and tyrannizes the black male, depriving him of his opportunity to flourish and grow into a healthy American man” (Scott 303-4).. This is “a. process that not only excludes the slave from a relation to the Name-of-the-Father, but also (and thereby) articulates the logic that mandates that slaves, regardless of gender, figure in mimetic relation not to their ‘mothers’ but to the ‘condition of their mothers’” (Edelman 49). To make it clearer, the slave is “womanized” in a patriarchal allotment that “produces the [white] human as man and everything else as, not even ‘woman,’ but non-man” (de Lauretis 121), probably not human at all.. Since black revolutionaries strived to reconfigure and. resuscitate black masculinity, the most urgent step would be to cure themselves of the physical and mental wounds exerted by the white oppressors in the public spheres on the one hand and the emasculating matriarchs in the private spaces on the other. This reasons why black nationalists discursively tune out female voice and relegate women to a domesticated or marginalized status. A typical patriarchal model characterizes the NOI to the extent that “[i]nstilling values was a major role of Black Muslim women in the. before the tragic killing occurs, is even depicted as a spiritual leader of not merely her family but the whole black community. As a sharp contrast, black men like Paul D, Stamp Paid and Sixo appear rather impotent and fail to conform to orthodox manliness. We can propose that slavery partially contributes to black female empowerment, though such power mostly emerge as a negative or destructive force in view of nationalism..

(30) Hsu 24. home and community” (West 44). Malcolm X in his Autobiography also alludes to Muhammad’s teaching that the black female’s “true nature is to be weak” and that a man “must control her if he expects to get her respect” even though he should hold her in esteem (326).. Meanwhile, for Malcolm X, women’s physiological advantage over men urges the. latter to “have something above and beyond the wife in order for her to be able to look to him for psychological security” (Autobiography 330).. At the same time that Muhammad and. Malcolm X admit the wife’s superiority in a biological sense, they also underscore black men’s indispensability on which she must rely for mental sanctuary.. The dichotomy and. hierarchy between spirituality and physicality comes into full play in the sexist assertions made by black nationalists.. No doubt that black men administer “higher,” spiritual terrains,. while black women “lower,” physical territories. It is unsurprising that some Black Power polities like the NOI which took more conservative routes exploited sexist language to counteract racial discrimination.. Yet surprisingly, the rhetoric of those radical,. unconventional organizations like the Black Panther Party endorsed no more advancement against sexism.. Sexual prejudices still suppress black women.. Female Panthers like. Kathleen Cleaver, Judi Douglas, Patricia Hilliard, Erica Huggins, and Artie Seale did exist, and Elaine Browne even took charge of the party in 1974 and effectuated some policies and welfares for the group and the people.12. Nevertheless, Browne still needed to hand over her. leadership upon Huey Newton’s return from Cuba, feeling “frustrated by the insubordination many male members showed to women in leadership roles” (Robinson 59-60).. From The. Black Panther, this organization’s newspaper, we also learn that women were mainly appointed to such trivial tasks as “typing, cooking, phone-answering, and message-relaying” (qtd. in Doss 488).. It would not be difficult to perceive black activists’ stealthy alienation of. female significance from nationalistic projects. Considering black male psychosexual 12. Browne’s leadership helped the Panthers to “[expand] their Breakfast for Children programs, [create] a number of commercial ventures in order to generate money for the organization’s programs, and [improve] the liberation schools, particularly the one in Oakland” (Robinson 59)..

(31) Hsu 25. power operating within this tactic, we can further recognize that black men, in a racist context, in fact require a tangible entity to be in the position of woman so that they can be real man and subvert white supremacy.. In Shulamith Firestones’s account, “the transformation of the. black woman into the traditional passive female creates a useful negative backdrop against which the black man’s own definition of himself as masculine (aggressive) can emerge” (118). In short, “the black men can be the ‘man’ if someone becomes the ‘woman’” (Firestone 118). As such, in disengaging black women from authoritative positions and assigning them to less important posts, black nationalist discourses and sexist ideologues ineluctably went hand in hand.. That is, to enhance black men’s self-awareness of the gender-inflected imperatives. framed by the nation-building projects, patriarchal sexism becomes far more paramount and irreplaceable. More shockingly, Cleaver went on to exaggerate female submissiveness by bringing his politics of rape to the fore.. The exercises of raping black women were strangely. upgraded as preliminary steps to firstly devalue the white female and ultimately wreak vengeance upon white men.. In “On Becoming,” Cleaver rationalizes such sexual violence. toward both black and white women by making the following absurd statement: I became a rapist.. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out. by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically [. . .]. Rape was an insurrectionary act.. It delighted me that I was defying. and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women. (33, emphasis added) Women of both races are therefore objectified as the black man’s vehicle to turn the tables on.

(32) Hsu 26. whites.. As long as he hones his “modus operandi” well enough, he would be able to. override his foes’ ordinances, plunder their properties, and collapse their authority. We can easily discern from Cleaver’s statement that the black’s reprisal takes up the very same trajectory as whites’ oppression does, except that the latter does not use their women as a tool against black men.. Where the white racist seeks to divest the black of their manhood by. raping their women, the black racist retrieves it via both intraracial and interracial sexual aggression. Insofar as black racism distinguishes itself in its appeal to nationalist discourses, misogyny inevitably stands out as the mainstay of the black masculinity project. Interestingly enough, Cleaver’s hostility to Afro-American women subdues as soon as he borrows Plato’s conceptualization of the Primeval Sphere in Symposium to repair the black male’s psychosexual damage.. He revises the Sphere as constitutive of two parts, male and. female, which would ultimately conjoin with each other to create a “Unitary Sexual Image” (207).. If slavery separates black men from women and keeps their intimate physical and. spiritual contact at bay, then “[a]cross the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my Queen” (Cleaver 237). Employing the specific union between he-man and “the Flower of Africa” thus enables Cleaver to maintain that only through the “re-love” of Black Beauty can his conquered manhood “be redeemed” (238).. With female passivity held firmly in place, he transforms a. forcible sexual intercourse into a blessed act of copulation. The discrepancy in his discourse, however, is in no case coincidental. To reinstate manliness, it seems, requires a man to at once cruelly treat and fervently embrace his female counterpart. however, partially nullifies this suggestion.. The logic of reproduction,. Sexual abuse against black women indeed. exhibits black male bravado to a considerable extent, but passionate coitus with them largely arises from the black man’s single-minded eagerness for posterity, and, by extension, for the reconstruction of a nation. All too often, nationalistic ideology moulds its subjects into converts to reproductive imperative, that is, to reproduce either a male to fight or a female to.

(33) Hsu 27. bear more offspring for the profit of a nascent nation.. Thus Muhammad’s metaphor. underlines female reproductivity: “The woman is man’s field to produce his nation” (qtd. in Robinson 42).. In Cleaver’s cosmology, moreover, the black woman’s “prone” position (qtd.. in Burns 119) not only indicates her docility to the male regime but signifies her servility to the nationalistic projects, one of whose aims is to reproduce. The nuclear family composed of a man and a woman simply fits the black male’s purpose, and his capability to impregnate her confirms his masculinity and cements his nationality. What underlies the rhetoric of reproduction, we can go further, is the intensification of—and a requisite for—heterosexuality, and such capitalist apparatuses as cultural products and mass media aid in mandating this prescription and disciplining individuals to internalize the norms of the heterosexual matrix.. The sixties’ America for the most part headed toward. capitalism and encouraged a consumption-based economy.. Monogamous structure matches. precisely with this sort of economic condition. Commodities produced by retooled war machines were so torrential that they needed to be channeled into “the stable, heterosexual family,” and “individuals and groups who did not fit the consumer norm were further marginalized” (Dievler 167-68). Advertising also offered images that accorded with bipolarized gender categories and normativized sexual preferences.. Since it was accessible. to almost every citizen through radios, newspapers, TV programs and commercials, this all-encompassing device lent its force to the homogenized figuration of gender and sexual identity.. Here we can recognize the correlativeness between consumptive modes and. heterosexual terms, a reciprocity which revitalizes the postwar economy and reconsolidates familial and sexual mores.. Given the political and social turbulences of that era, this move. effectuates the state’s institutionalized surveillance and its oppression of revolting groups. On the other hand, some may contend that sexual liberalism during the decade countervailed the rigidity of prescriptive sexuality, but its bondage to the consumer culture in fact told another story.. As John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have cogently observed, whereas.

(34) Hsu 28. eroticization prevailed in popular culture like movies and music, it was still held in check and confined “within a heterosexual framework of long-term, monogamous relationships” (300). Sexual impetus was less legitimized than reinscribed into a naturalized myth which registers instead conventional moral standards and, consequently, conforms to capitalist assumptions. The focus on heterosexism and reproduction, as a result, resonates discursively with the black nationalistic rhetoric which must in turn reconfigure black manhood. That the Black Power movement extols traditional familial structure and ethics should not be any surprise.. What truly requires scrutiny is that black activists’ attempts to deploy. an amalgamation of misogynist, reproductive, and heterosexist discourses throw into relief the Black Macho agenda,13 a masculinist strain which lurks behind the nation-building programs.. That is, these three elements—misogyny, reproduction, and heterosexism—are. synthesized into the formation and performance of black machismo.. Stefanie Dunning is. correct in pinpointing that “[b]lack nationalism is invested in the production of a patriarchal hegemony, where the black male body is the legitimate space of suffering and where the ultimate reproductive aim of the nation is not only to reproduce blackness, but maleness” (“Parallel Perversions” 98, emphasis added). Black men emerge as the primary and only victims to vent fury on their oppressors.. To enlarge male significance with virility and. bellicosity is indeed closely related to the manhood necessary to catalyze the birth of a black nation.. Yet the concurrent homogeneity within the nation unavoidably leads to a repressive. gender politics that feminists would rebuke, and a suffocating mechanism against sexuality that gay and lesbian activists must denunciate. Hence hooks, a renowned black feminist, disagrees about the presupposition that “racism is more oppressive to black men than black women,” claiming that this misguided assumption is “fundamentally based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity” (Yearning 75).. 13. Wallace in her thought-provoking essay,. Such an amalgamation is far from flawless. I would later expose its self-contradictory logic within Black Power movement in the following discussion..