Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology 9781512809565

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Our Black Nations Reconsidered
1. My Father's Many Mansions: James Baldwin and the Architecture of Masculine Authority
2. The Clumsy Trap of Manhood: Revolutionary Nationalism, John Edgar Wideman, and Remembrance
3. Dark Intimacies: Sex, Nationalism, and Forgetting
4. How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism and Performativity
Conclusion: Masculine Legacies
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Our Living Manhood Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology ROLLAND MURRAY

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murray, Holland. Our living manhood : literature, Black Power, and masculine ideology / Holland Murray, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3972-0 ISBN-10: 0-8122-3972-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. African American men—Political activity—History—20th century. 2. African American men—Intellectual life—20th century. 3. American literature—African American authors. 4. Black Power—United States—History—20th century. 5. Masculinity—United States—History—20th century. I Title. E185.86.M958 2007 305.38'896073—dc22 2006045677

For my parents, Willie and Lottie

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Contents

Introduction: Our Black Nations Reconsidered

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1. My Father's Many Mansions: James Baldwin and the Architecture of Masculine Authority 13 2. The Clumsy Trap of Manhood: Revolutionary Nationalism, 40 John Edgar Wideman, and Remembrance 3. Dark Intimacies: Sex, Nationalism, and Forgetting

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4. How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism and Performativity 94 Conclusion: Masculine Legacies Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Our Black Nations Reconsidered

In 1965 Malcolm X's death prompted remarkable expressions of grief from black Americans even as the loss occasioned reinvention of their political identities.1 This interplay between lack and possibility animated the often-cited eulogy performed by actor Ossie Davis. Lamenting that Malcolm was "extinguished now, and gone from us forever," Davis nonetheless affirmed that the "proud community" could find no "braver, more gallant young champion than the Afro-American who lies before us— unconquered still."2 The eulogy's synthesis of death, eternity, and communal identity calls to mind Benedict Anderson's observation that nationalisms routinely evoke the sacrifices of the dead in order to underscore the perpetuity of the nation itself. For while sacrifice reminds us of our own mortality, Anderson argues, nations "loom out of an immemorial past, and still more important, glide into a limitless future."3 Yet in this instance it is also the notion of racial identity as such that Davis represents as exceeding its earthbound limits. Malcolm "had stopped being a 'Negro' years ago," that term having "become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American, and he wanted so desperately—that we, that all his people would become Afro-Americans too."4 The grandeur of national sacrifice has its corollary in the capacious redefinition of racial subjectivity. And further shoring up the ties between grief and the potentialities of the nation is Davis's triumphant pronouncement that Malcolm "was our manhood, our living black manhood! That was his meaning to his people. And in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves."5 The eulogy equates the racialized national community with the reconstruction of masculine identity and thereby reproduces a logic of communal belonging that has been a fixture of black politics from the antebellum era to the present.6 It is far from accidental therefore that Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), one of the founding texts of Black Power nationalism, cites the eulogy to legitimate its own agenda. In its endeavor to fill the void left by the dead, Cleaver too ventriloquizes the will of a nation that will "have our manhood" or "the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it."7 For some time now commentators have taken the Black Power movement to task for this heady alchemy of nationalism and masculine affirmation.

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Introduction

From Angela Davis's observation that she was frustrated by male advocates who "measured their sexual height by women's genuflection" to bell hooks's assertion that male nationalists let "sisters know that they should assume a subordinate role to lay the groundwork for the emergent black patriarchy," these critiques consistently stress that the movement's masculinist bent effectively marginalized black women.8 No doubt these interventions have been indispensable in promoting an ongoing analysis of how gender inequalities are reproduced in African American politics and culture. But notwithstanding the merits of such arguments, almost no one has examined the challenge to the movement's masculinist politics issued in works by authors such as James Alan McPherson, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Hal Bennett, and John Oliver Killens. In fiction and essays written during the heyday of Black Power, they tracked the unevenness, political incoherence, and anxiety that beset nationalisms tethered to masculinist identity politics. Indeed, their dissidence reminds us that key purveyors of these gender ideologies were at times quite ambivalent about the movement's privileging of masculinity. The era's masculine focus thus bred contradictions for those within the movement and criticisms from those outside it. By recovering this forgotten cultural history, my book seeks to demonstrate how an era of nationalist advocacy was defined as much by its fault lines as by the pursuit of racial solidarity. The cleavages generated by nationalist recourse to masculine identity can be fruitfully reassessed by attending more fully to how gender ideologies intersected with the overarching agendas of the movement. As a matter of course, nationalists equated political and aesthetic success with the development of new forms of identity, and therefore they self-consciously theorized strategies for refashioning black subjects. For instance, in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967), Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton pronounce that blacks must "achieve self identity and self determination in order to have their daily needs met."9 One of the first efforts to theorize Black Power systematically, their book proposes that building a shared racial consciousness necessarily precedes political action. And echoing the sentiment of Carmichael and Hamilton, Congress of Racial Equality director James Farmer captures what became commonplace among Black Power activists in claiming that the "black man was taught to abnegate himself. Now he is rejecting that notion and seeking to develop a pride, a dignity, a self-esteem, and an identity."10 If white supremacist nationalism legitimated itself through ritual negation of blackness, the new nationalisms codified their authority by negating that negation and in turn producing new moorings for African American being. Arguably, the logic that foregrounded identity as a definitive end for black nationalism was even more pervasive among nationalist aesthetes. Dramatist and poet K William Kgositsile advances a characteristic

Our Black Nations Reconsidered

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view when he defines the nationalist theatre as "a definitive act, a decisive song. There will be portions of actual life unveiled. All the things we could have been. All the things we are. All the things we will be. There will be instruction. There will be construction. There will be destruction."11 Kgositsile's theatre then was above all else a new set of aesthetic techniques for dismantling and reconstructing subjects. So that despite consequential ideological and tactical disagreement on a number of other fronts, in the aggregate the new nationalisms legitimated a stance in which the invention of alternative identities became a necessary first option in achieving political emancipation. Masculinity was a critical term in this struggle—for representations of male identities intersected with political ideologies that addressed and legitimated revolutionary violence, charismatic authority, rhetorical performance, and nationalist sexuality. These intersections recommend a reading of masculinity along the lines of Stuart Hall's suggestion that we attend more carefully to how ideologies "connote or summon up one another in articulating differences in the ideological field."12 Hall usefully submits that ideologies achieve their political import not only through their differences from each other but also in how their meanings slide into one another. His claim proves especially generative in this context because it provides a conceptual model for understanding the subtle ways that masculinist ideology was insinuated into the most fundamental premises of nationalist politics. Indeed, it may be the pliant utility of masculinity, the fluid ways that it combines and recombines with a range of contradictory political positions that illuminates its seductiveness in the past as well as in our own time. Such a formulation also has explanatory power in accounting for the varied and competing ways that nationalists evoked masculine selfhood. Bourgeois nationalist entities such as the Nation of Islam developed a model of masculine selfhood that depended on the paternal and filial networks traditionally attributed to patriarchy. Consequently, they emphasized the reconstitution of the patriarchal nuclear family and a strict imposition of separate spheres for the genders. Alternately, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, and other Marxist organizations rejected the patriarchal family as a model for political self-fashioning and instead privileged embodied male resistance as one of its enduring political constructs. And cultural nationalists such as Ron Karenga's US organization stressed the liberating effects of masculine performance precisely because they viewed cultural particularity as the means to political autonomy. To track these developments sufficiently masculinity must be framed as more a floating signifier than a fixed essence or a list of attributes. For it is within these shifting relations that masculinity took on its multiple ideological meanings. Further mapping of these intersections also requires an engagement

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Introduction

with the synchronic dimensions of ideology—an unpacking of how ideologies operated across temporal and political divisions within the movement. Black Power advocates constructed their nationalisms in the absence of fully realized institutions or even a clearly designated geographical terrain that could be described as a state or a nation. Consequently, their nationalisms were particularly acute manifestations of Louis Althusser's now famous claim that ideology "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."13 Put another way, the representational dimensions of ideology that so preoccupied Althusser take on heightened significance in a context wherein the grounds for constituting nationhood were often figurative and symbolic. His argument that interpellation is a "hailing" of subjects through language and representation offers an interpretive frame for reading the rituals, codes, and narratives whereby the movement labored to dislodge black subjects from their position within white American nationalism and to reposition them as reflections of alternative representational economies. It is what Althusser refers to as the "speculary" or "mirror-structure" of ideology that his work contributes to the examination of black nationalism. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror-stage, he establishes a correlation between the fragmented infantile subject taking comfort in misrecognizing its coherent representation in the mirror as its actual self and the subject recognizing its image in ideological representations. For "the human subject is de-centered, constituted by a structure which has no 'center' either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the 'ego/ i.e. in the ideological formations in which it 'recognizes' itself."14 In this regard, Althusser's assertion that "you and I are always already subjects and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition" references the process wherein one's being is codified and recognized in the speculary representations of the other.15 This focus on ideology's capacity to concretize being through representation coincided with a Black Power movement that was also theorizing new methods for interpellating subjects. But while nationalist theory overlapped consequentially with Althusser's work, it placed a distinctive emphasis on the particular legacies of subjection that defined U.S. racial struggle. Whether in its efforts to reconstitute the patriarchal black family, reclaim the autonomy of the masculine black body, retool the politics of male oratory, or assert the necessity of new forms of masculine sexuality, the movement grounded its political assertions in interpellative models that were intended to counter historically entrenched racial subordination. In making these claims nationalists did not always adequately address how their negations of white supremacy produced troublesome assumptions in their own nationalism. And it was precisely this instability within nationalist dialectics that male fiction writers of the day probed so cannily. Their work should thus be understood

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as an extension of the flows and contradictions that were already operating within the Black Power movement. In recasting the Black Power era as being definitively shaped by its internal contradictions, my own thinking has been challenged considerably by developments in the evolving field of masculinity studies. More specifically, the pioneering work of cultural critics Robert Reid-Pharr and Philip Brian Harper asks us to imagine black nationalism as a formation that is not a cohesive totality but a set of identity claims that are always internally divided. Their work can be properly understood as part of a broader turn toward postidentity scholarship in the late 1980s and early 1990s—an intellectual development that interrogated not only the monolithic racial identities that undergird Black Power nationalisms but also the quasi-nationalist identity politics of the vernacular criticism of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker Jr.16 Along these lines, ReidPharr argues suggestively that the development of a bourgeois domestic order grounded in the patriarchal nuclear family has generated extraordinary anxieties in the black nationalist imagination since the midnineteenth century. Nationalists like Martin Delany routinely equated emancipation with the establishment of autonomous, respectable, bourgeois households. And as Delany policed the boundaries between proper and improper expressions of middle-class domesticity and sexuality, he denied "the ambiguity of the bourgeois position," a stance that often depended on a sadistic "subordination of other classes."17 In so doing he "was forced to engage in the very acts of ritual domination that typify the master/slave dyad that he decries."18 One powerful implication of this argument is that the necessary interdependence of black nationalism and white middle-class ideology vexed early efforts to enunciate a fully autonomous and racially particular national identity. Reid-Pharr's inclination to underscore the compromised state of antebellum nationalism parallels Phillip Brian Harper's evocative work on the cultural nationalism of the 1960s. In Harper's view, the interpellative calls of black nationalists served not only "to promote racial solidarity" but to engender "a division among blacks," between those who were appropriately masculine nationalist subjects and those who were not.19 The cohesive identities that Black Power advocates constructed bear a resemblance to their antecedents in that the very articulation of a masculine self as the foundation for racial cohesion also announces the anxious fragility of this strategy. I build on these reconsiderations of nationalist identity claims by suggesting that the turn toward masculinist ideology was also a conspicuously contested feature of the Black Power era. It is not only that this nationalism undermines itself through fraught assertions of unitary communal identities but that these efforts to represent the race politically and aesthetically animated significant ideological disagreement. The archive of writings

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Introduction

testifying to this legacy of conflict recommends that scholars in masculinity studies recognize that contemporary critiques of identity are also an extension of a vital intellectual history in which literary writers have interrogated identitarian political claims. An especially apt preface to the forms of knowledge generated in reconstructing that history can be found in James Alan McPherson's short story "Of Kings and Cabbages." Published as part of McPherson's acclaimed collection Hue and Cry (1969), the story focuses on Claude Sheats, a disaffected black nationalist who works to reinvent the political identity of his roommate Howard. As Howard presents it, he has good reason to be skeptical of Claude's instruction, for the latter's claims are so riddled with contradictions that he "hated whites as much as he loved them. And he hated himself with the same passion. He hated the country and his place in it and he loved the country and his place in it."20 Working to bring about "the Black Man's time to rule again," Claude enacts his brand of nationalism through his sexual liaisons with white women, each encounter serving as "an actual conquest, a physical affirmation of a psychological victory over all he hated and loved and hated in the little world of his room" (114). If Claude hopes to establish a kind of freedom through his sexual negation of whiteness, his labor only serves to multiply the fractures in his strategy. As the tale unfolds, it charts the devastating consequences of Claude's philosophy for both men. Once the instability of Claude's politics increases, so too does his need to demonstrate the validity of his preachments. After each sexual conquest, he experiences a "silent emptiness that quickly intensified into nervousness," and during "these times he would tell me more subtleties about the Man and he would re-predict the fall of the country" (115). By professing his racial gospel, Claude holds back the avalanche of inconsistencies that threaten to efface his politics and his very selfhood. Only by his persistent hailing of the convert can Claude hope to hold together his fantasy of radical personal and social change. Underscoring Claude's compulsive need to reify his politics in the ear of his brother, the narrative casts this fraternal bond as a thin splint holding together his masculine selfhood. Claude's affirmation of his political identity ultimately degenerates into a paranoid and tyrannical impulse to dominate Howard. The insular room in which Claude resists white domination serves as a locus for these anxieties when he grows suspicious that Howard, "a black devil," has begun "walking about in his room after he had gone out" (120). Claude's growing neuroses about his sexual politics express themselves in the delusion that Howard might discover and expose the suspect practices taking place within the confines of his boudoir. It is part of the narrative's corrosive irony, however, that Howard has already articulated the very political incoherence that Claude

Our Black Nations Reconsidered 7 seeks to repress. Trapped by the limits of his own tactics of negation, Claude's paranoia becomes so acute that he bursts into Howard's room and threatens murder as he "stood over the bed in the dark room and shook his big fist" (123). Meanwhile Howard is so cowed by this threat that he "lay there hating the overwhelming cowardice in me, which kept my body still and my eyes closed, hoping that he would kill all of it when his heavy fist landed" (123). In McPherson's rendering, the model of political emancipation in which the nationalist realizes a speculary communal identity by hailing the convert is predicated on the desperate violence of the sadist and the ritual annihilation of the masochist. The story thereby writes the coercive dimensions of nationalist becoming, the unsavory compromises embedded in a particular bid for emancipation. Certainly, the emphasis on the sadomasochism that inheres in this interpellative model parallels but also prefigures the theoretical observations that Reid-Pharr attributes to early nationalism. But even more innovative here is McPherson's framing of the sadism as a definitive feature of the relations between black nationalists and the men they summoned. Or to read McPherson's text from a different angle, his work distills the conflicted relation between fiction and the ideology of Black Power that animates my subsequent chapters. A crucial part of the work that fiction performed during this period was to trace the premises and suppositions of nationalist ideologies in ways that underscored at once their allure and their limitation. And this may well explain why narrative modes that tend to mimic and defamiliarize the effects of ideology—that is, parody, satire, comedy, and dialogism—figure so prominently in the works of McPherson and his contemporaries. At the same time, these formal attributes of fiction only partially account for why these narratives surfaced as a conspicuous check on the movement's ideological excesses. Unlike earlier twentieth-century literary periods—the Harlem Renaissance, the proletariat era of the 1930s, the potent flowering of integrationist literature after World War II—fiction was not a privileged genre among nationalist aesthetes during the Black Power movement. Breaking with a longer tradition that foregrounded the novel as a vital tool in improving the social standing of the black public, nationalists routinely construed drama, poetry, and autobiography as the preferred modes for disseminating their ideology.21 When cultural nationalists, for example, argued that political emancipation required black control of artistic production, they implemented their agenda by creating black-owned arts journals (Negro Digest/Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, Broadside Series, Black Dialogue), publishing houses (Broadside Press, Jihad Press, Black Arts Publication), and arts organizations (Black Arts Repertory Theater/ School, Spirit House, the Watts Repertory Theatre, Affro-Arts Theater) that focused disproportionately on poetry and drama.22 A chief rationale

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Introduction

for such generic preferences was that these literary modes offered a more immediate and potentially transformative access to black audiences than did the novel. So certain of this distinction was the influential nationalist critic and poet Stephen Henderson that he could argue with confidence: "The poets and playwrights are especially articulate and especially relevant and speak directly to the people."23 Or, in the more anecdotal terms of playwright Ed Bullins, "I was busting my head trying to write novels and felt somehow that my people don't read novels. . . . But when they are in the theater I've got them."24 In the eyes of nationalist aesthetes, poetry and drama were uniquely poised to interpellate black subjects because these forms most readily evoked the essence of a racial particularity that was to galvanize the new national consciousness. It was this sensibility that propelled the ongoing investment in vernacular culture.25 Henderson took the jazz of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker as illustrative of the ways that the nationalist aesthetic "got hold of us, 'got way inside us,' and set dazzling with blackness the minds of those who hear them as they screech 'love in rolling sheets of sound.' Parker was blackness, Coltrane was blackness—the full spectrum of it."26 Paradoxically, then, vernacular cultural forms were imagined to be simultaneously already there, an essential part of what made blacks a distinct collectivity, and the very thing that had to be recuperated in order to return those subjects to their true identities. The relatively peripheral place of fiction with respect to both the ideology of nationalist aesthetics and the material production of texts made it possible for the novel to become a more likely vehicle for dissent. Of course there were also fiction writers who theorized a more affirmative relation to Black Power nationalism. William Melvin Kelly's Dem (1967), Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), and Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveasss Nigger (1969) are all texts that imagine how fiction can integrate the principles of the new nationalisms into the novel form. But even if we give due note to such works, they were dwarfed in scale and influence by the volumes of poetry and drama that were produced at the same time. While black male novelists worked in a medium that gave them greater latitude for the expression of dissent, their objections did not track along a unified political axis. Indeed, their relationships to the masculinist ideologies of the day were often uneven and contradictory. But this very inconsistency is also the reason that these works offer such rich vehicles for revising our views about the relays between nationalism and gender. A case in point is the way that this fiction confirms and troubles the branch of masculinity studies advocated by scholars such as Michael Awkward and Joseph Boone. These male feminists argue that men's intellectual work in support of a feminism must expose "the latent multiplicity and difference"

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in the word "men" and thereby disrupt "unproblematized perceptions of monolithic and/or normative maleness."27 Dissident male writers certainly affirmed this politics in that they challenged dominant assertions about the relationship between masculinity and national political success. However, the theoretical model presented by Awkward also potentially reinscribes the black male intellectual's unfortunate history of usurping female autonomy through a solipsistic concern with masculinity.28 While he takes pains to avoid this problem, his claim that black men can contribute to feminism by recovering a masculinity that contains "useful means and methods of interacting with a repressed female interiority" lays the groundwork for a masculine appropriation of the feminine.29 The writers at the center of Our Living Manhood provide a generative alternative to this theoretical stance. At times their dissent expressed a shrewd critical awareness of how women's political participation was truncated by masculine social arrangements. In other instances their own critical reservations were impoverished by an inability to draw meaningful connections between particular masculinist ideologies and the subjugation of women. The very contradictions of these writings require a method of reading that takes gender ideologies as evolving objects of inquiry rather than as a set of stable political propositions to be denounced or embraced. So, while my book is deeply influenced by and sympathetic toward the critical insights of feminism, it also seeks to foreground the recovery of the often politically vexed exchanges routed through gender difference. To further underscore this view of masculinity's ideological unevenness, I am especially concerned with why these dissident writings have not played a more significant role in our understanding of the period's literary culture. In telling the story of how dissent has been neglected, erased, and elided, I position masculine ideology within the broader history of critical reception and practice. In the case of James Alan McPherson, his audience framed him as an aesthete whose commitment to literary craft posed a necessary counter to nationalist aesthetics. Commentaries by the likes of Ralph Ellison, Irving Howe, and Granville Hicks celebrated Hue and Cry because in Hicks's words McPherson "does not go into spasms of indignation every time he describes an act of injustice."30 Although critics articulated the aesthetic divide between McPherson's fiction and aesthetes who were aligned with the new nationalisms, they did not assess the full range of ideological overlap between his work and movement advocacy. And more recently Herman Beavers's otherwise shrewd analysis of McPherson's fiction only devotes the most cursory attention to the author's substantial conflict with Black Power ideology.31 By reexamining the archival documents and neglected literary works linking these writers to the Black Power movement, I pursue a reconfiguration of the cultural history of the period and the literary biographies of individual authors.

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Introduction

These contrary overlays between literature and ideology unfolded with a striking vigor in the essays and fiction of James Baldwin. Consequently, Chapter 1 submits that the representation of his conflicted encounter with the NOI in The Fire Next Time (1963) effectively prefigured the uneasy nexus between male writers and Black Power that will be the principal concern of subsequent chapters. As Baldwin presents it, NOI philosophy operated under the premise that by submitting to the paternal authority of the group's leader, Elijah Muhammad, converts would be liberated from the tyranny of white supremacy. Baldwin depicts this submission to Muhammad as a pernicious abandonment of freedom as such. In mounting a challenge to the NOI, he became one of the first commentators to critically address the strain of patriarchal nationalism that would be more broadly contested with the rise of revolutionary nationalism. The second half of Chapter 1 submits that masculinist discourses were pivotal in Baldwin's efforts to establish himself as a relevant contributor to the black radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In exploring this shift, I reexamine Baldwin's uneasy position among the younger generation of radicals and his quiescence in the face of Eldridge Cleaver's homophobic commentary. Baldwin's response to Cleaver and other advocates pivoted on his desire to fashion himself as a masculine subject and maintain his political relevance. Nonetheless, he did express significant trepidation about his alliance with Black Power advocates in his fiction. His novel Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone (1968), written at the height of his public support for Black Power, focuses on a gay male artist who is destroyed by his blind allegiance to a young nationalist advocate. Casting this union in dystopian terms, the novel forcefully troubles the very type of solidarity with Black Power radicals that Baldwin advocated in his nonfiction. Thus the chapter pursues the recuperation of a subtle reflexivity in Baldwin's later work. By the late 1960s, the patriarchal nationalism of the NOI gave way to the revolutionary nationalism of organizations such as the Black Panthers and the Revolutionary Action Movement. Drawing upon the theories of the international revolutionaries Frantz Fanon, Mao Tse-tung, and Robert Williams, these organizations asked the African American public to imagine its political reality through representations in which the masculine body and mind indexed the race's political standing. In Chapter 2 I seek to demonstrate both that the commitment to masculine embodiment and consciousness generated ideological conflict within revolutionary nationalism and that the consequences of such tensions were cannily imagined in John Edgar Wideman's novel The Lynchers (1973). Working to draw connections between fiction and ideology, the chapter shuttles between analysis of the newspapers, political tracts, and autobiographies of revolutionary nationalists on the one hand and the radicalism represented

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in the novel on the other. In closing, the chapter probes the historical irony that Wideman's writings in the 1990s reinterpret the radicalism of the 1960s in ways that are diametrically opposed to the skeptical portrait of revolutionary politics in The Lynchers. I thereby illuminate how the author's recent work has obscured his historically vexed relationship to revolutionary nationalism during the Black Power era. The political implications of nationalist paradigms that foregrounded the masculine body in imagining social transformation were equally unsettling as the movement tied sexuality to nationalist insurgency. Through an examination of fiction and essays by Clarence Major and Hal Bennett, Chapter 3 will reassess how discourses about male sexuality became central to consolidating nationalist identities. Movement advocates Amiri Baraka, Lerone Bennett, and Calvin Hernton argued that white nationalism reified itself historically through the sexual abjection of blacks, and thus, only in overcoming that legacy could the black public achieve its liberation. A chief expression of this ideology was the flowering of literary works that involve the sexual conquest or violation of white women. Self-consciously trading in the historical specter of the black male as rapist, Baraka and others consolidated their nationalism in relation to the representations of a white supremacist nationalism that had been part of the American scene since the late nineteenth century. At the same time that the movement heralded their counters as an avenue to freedom, they also submitted that heterosexual Eros between black Americans would serve as a negation of the race's historical subordination. Both of these strategies are treated with skepticism in the work of Major and Bennett. While Major was initially a supporter of black nationalism, he eventually dissented from its pervasive notion that establishing the sexual autonomy and authority of black men was necessary for the emancipation of the black public. Tracing the relationships between his novel Ail-Night Visitors (1969), his archival essays, and the movement's discourses on black male sexuality, Chapter 3 argues that Major's dystopian portrait of male eroticism rewrote nationalist sexual ideology as a politics that fell short of its ends. Along similar lines, Major grew deeply skeptical of nationalist claims that black heterosexual Eros contained the seeds of communal emancipation. Hal Bennett's engagement with this sexual politics was equally robust. His novel Lord of Dark Places (1970) is preoccupied with defining the limits of nationalist enterprises that exalt the liberating power of the phallus. Stressing the underlying homoerotics of nationalist phallocentrism, the work upsets conventional nationalist oppositions between heterosexuality and homosexuality to corrode Black Power ideologies. The novel thus trades in the defining ambivalence that emerged in the strain of nationalist discourse that constituted nationalism over and against the abject homosexual male.

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Introduction

Chapter 4 confronts the contradictions embedded in nationalist identity politics more extensively by unearthing the tense relationship between nationalist John Oliver Killens and the performative cultural nationalism that became orthodoxy in the late 1960s. The Republic of New Africa, US, and other organizations argued that black political emancipation must be preceded by a reclamation of African cultural forms, customs, and modes of self-fashioning. US founder Ron Karenga submits that collectivity based on common cultural assumptions "gives identity, purpose, and direction," "legitimizes a people's action and in turn gives self respect."32 In this way, legible expressions of cultural fluency became inseparable from the quest for political success. Within this broader paradigm, proponents of cultural nationalism stressed that masculine speech had an almost magical power to remake black identities—and thus to liberate subjects from the strictures of white supremacy. Theorizing a racially coded version of performative language, nationalists constructed a political ideology that troubled figures like Killens. In essays as well as in his novel The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), he worked through his trepidation about nationalist dependence on performative identities. Undoubtedly, Killens's skepticism has to be understood as an outgrowth of critiques of cultural nationalism from within the movement more broadly. Whether in the systematic critiques of leftists such as Robert Allen or in the nascent uncertainty of poets such as Sonia Sanchez, there was no clear consensus about the capacity of culture to foster black political autonomy. At the same time, Killens's work introduces the category of masculine identity into these debates more extensively than his peers, so that even as he was himself often complicit in the masculinist inclinations of the movement, his work also posed some of the most withering questions about the inadequacies of performative masculinities. The final chapter positions my work within public discourse about gender within African American studies as well as in the broader debates about the end of identity politics in the academy. Unfortunately, conversations about gender within African American studies have been limited by a penchant for fractiousness that is itself a byproduct of the Black Power era. At the same time the model of reading this strain of the counterculture also speaks to contemporary debates about the critique of identity as a political category. The divides shaping a founding period in identity politics have been elided in these debates. The book concludes by initiating a conversation about how the protocols of our present would be usefully informed by a more rigorous consideration of the intellectual and cultural history that we have too often neglected.

Chapter 1

My Father's Many Mansions: James Baldwin and the Architecture of Masculine Authority

The dramatic aesthetic and political shift that commentators have noted in James Baldwin's work after 1964 is inseparable from his negotiations with Black Power ideology. Essayist Julius Lester offers one version of this argument when he claims that in the later Baldwin "a black vision of the world" slowly "gained precedence over a humanistic one."1 These scholars do not make such remarks to criticize the writer's celebration of blackness but rather to vilify his complicity in the radicalism of the late 1960s. Having surrendered to the dogmatism of Black Power, critics charge, Baldwin lost his individualistic bent and consequently his ability to serve as a voice of opposition against what David Van Leer terms the Black Power movement's "rhetorical excesses."2 Though not wholly inaccurate, these commentators tend to occlude and minimize the profound criticisms that Baldwin leveled at the Nation of Islam, an organization that was central to shaping Black Power ideology. Moreover, Baldwin's capitulation to the movement's philosophy was neither as straightforward nor as total as existing accounts suggest. Because critics have assumed Baldwin's alliance with the movement, neither his skepticism regarding nationalism nor his ambiguous ties to radical organizations such as the Black Panthers have been sufficiently examined.3 In reconsidering Baldwin's relationship to the NOI, this chapter submits that their conflict was a founding instance in the volatile exchanges that transpired between black male writers and Black Power ideologies. To read his encounter with the NOI as a commentary on Black Power politics is admittedly somewhat anachronistic, for his critique of the NOI was first published in 1962 and the popularization of Black Power began in 1966. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the rumblings of what became the Black Power movement were first played out in the growing national popularity of the NOI in the early sixties. Therefore, in this chapter I break with the conventional understanding of Baldwin's encounter with the NOI as primarily an outgrowth of his civil rights activism. Instead,

14 Chapter 1 I reposition this encounter as part of a liminal period in black political history wherein he and black America stood uncertainly between the old civil rights order and the new Black Power radicalism. The tension between Baldwin and the NOI began in part because they shared a belief that emancipation from a legacy of white supremacy could be achieved by fundamentally transforming the ideologies that endowed black subjects with coherent identities. Both posited speculary representations of black selfhood that could be identified with, internalized, and made manifest in the lived reality of black constituents. And it was in part through the realization of these representations that Baldwin and the NOI suggested that freedom existed. But though Baldwin and the NOI shared the belief that a transformation of black selfhood was essential to the quest for freedom, they disagreed over the form this subjectivity should take. Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind," an essay documenting his 1961 meeting with NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, identifies the source of the tension between himself and Muhammad as a dispute over the shape of liberated being: "Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and it seemed to him I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself.... I suppose that I would like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah's meaning and mine were not the same."4 He goes on to represent Muhammad and his followers as a group that viewed the subject's liberty as necessarily dependent upon a redemptive patriarchal ideology. As Baldwin casts NOI ideology, it operated under the premise that by surrendering the self to Muhammad's paternal authority, converts could be liberated from a legacy of white American tyranny. In his counter to the NOI's patriarchal model of liberation, Baldwin proposes that black subjects embrace a form of subjectivity that creates freedom by dismantling received patriarchal ideologies—indeed, a mode of selfhood that facilitates liberation through its skeptical treatment of racial, national, and gender ideologies more broadly. Baldwin subtly outlines the political limitations of the group's brand of patriarchal politics and traces the shape that a more effective form of liberated being might take. By exploring the contours of the disagreement between Baldwin and the NOI, I agree that his criticism of the organization pivoted on his suspicions that patriarchal ideology debilitates rather than liberates black subjects. To assert that Baldwin criticized the NOI's patriarchal politics is not to claim that he did not himself construct masculinist models of emancipation. Baldwin's writings prior to 1964 are characterized by a critical tracing of the pernicious effects of patriarchal social arrangements on the one hand and a tendency to privilege masculine subjectivity as the locus of emancipation on the other. The distinction between the two strains of discourse is crucial to mapping the shifting grounds of gender ideology

My Father's Many Mansions

15

in Baldwin's work. During this period, he was generally critical of social arrangements that were patriarchal or clearly organized around the authority of the father, his prohibitive laws, his male lineage, and his control over the sexuality of women.5 Alternately, Baldwin was more ambiguous in his criticism of masculinist social formulations, the conglomeration of discourses and habits that link the particular anatomy of the male body to distinct activities and forms of authority.6 Which is to say that Baldwin was not entirely consistent in making challenges to ideologies that presumed that men could claim certain rights, privileges, and authority because of the bodies they inhabited. Even as Baldwin raised critical questions about the NOI's patriarchal politics, certain strains of his social philosophy conflated the quest for black freedom with the fashioning of black masculinity. Moreover, the very instability of Baldwin's political alliances speaks to the ways in which nationalism itself always coexisted with alternate ideologies that threatened to undo its preachments. Both Malcolm X's split with the NOI in 1965 and the Black Panthers' repudiation of patriarchal nationalism were symptomatic of the ways that competing ideologies often disrupted the consolidation of paternal authority at the very moment in which it was being enunciated. Whereas the first half of this chapter examines the nature of Baldwin's ideological clash with Elijah Muhammad and the NOI, the second half reexamines his increasing investment in masculinist and patriarchal politics during the late sixties and early seventies. This evolution in his gender politics was part of Baldwin's broader embrace of Black Power in the same period. His aesthetic and political shift was bolstered by the repression of his suspicions about the limits of patriarchal and masculinist ideology. Marked by the younger generation of Black Power advocates as what he calls a "doubtful quantity," Baldwin sought to remedy his political alienation by affirming the centrality of masculinist social structures in forging a radical political agenda.7 Nevertheless, as his biographers cursorily intimate, Baldwin was quite conflicted privately about his alliance with Black Power radicals. What these biographical accounts inadequately address is that his fiction offered an acute critical assessment of the very solidarity with black radicals that he promoted elsewhere. His 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone tells the story of a gay African American actor who is nearly destroyed by his unquestioning allegiance and love for a young black radical. My reading of this novel significantly revises the more common critical view that Baldwin was wholly compliant with the exigencies of Black Power. Whether in the nascent stages of Power advocacy or at the height of the movement, gender ideologies were crucial in the articulation of both Baldwin's dissent from patriarchal nationalism and his conflicted solidarity with Black Power radicals.

16 Chapter 1

Baldwin and the Changing Politics of a Nation In the summer of 1961, when Baldwin met Elijah Muhammad, the author was in a state of profound political uncertainty. Vexed by what he understood as the declining relevance of the civil rights movement yet unable to accept the nationalist ideology of the NOI, Baldwin seemed to have no political foundation on which to stand. Contributing to his anxieties was the reality that the black polity was undergoing a political shift that granted the nationalist ideology of the NOI unprecedented public attention and legitimacy.8 Teetering on shifting political ground, Baldwin struggled to forestall black investment in the nationalist ideology of the NOI and posited his own model of liberated subjectivity. Baldwin's essay examining the NOI meeting, "Letter from a Region in My Mind," created a national sensation that thrust him into the public sphere in a manner that forever changed him. Earning record sales for the New Yorker, the piece was so popular that publishers scrambled to put together a book version only two months after its magazine printing.9 Renamed "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" and accompanied by a brief introductory letter, the essay became the centerpiece of the bestseller The Fire Next Time. The public appeal of the book version only consolidated Baldwin's status as a national spokesman on racial politics. As biographer James Campbell argues, in the five years after the essay was first published, "Baldwin's life consists largely of outer events, forming a story that can be told only by making constant reference to the public record."10 Through an exhausting regimen of college circuit tours, platform speeches, television appearances, and radio interviews, Baldwin took on a burden that he had tried diligently to avoid in his early career; he had become a "Negro Leader."11 What may account for the sensational appeal of "Down at the Cross" is the manner in which the essay allowed the public to explore its anxieties about the changing character of black politics. Critical reception ranged from the conservative admonition that the essay contains a "kind of pride that produces [black] separatism and nationalism" to the humanist assertion that "Baldwin pleads for a larger truth than the Black Muslims."12 Read by contemporaries as both Baldwin's affirmation of King's nonviolent protest and an indication of the author's conversion to black nationalism, the essay became "a convenient lightning rod" for the political instability of the black polity.13 The fact that "Down at the Cross" could be interpreted so disparately was also a function of Baldwin's own political ambivalence. In an interview the same year as the NOI meeting, Baldwin simultaneously registered his commitment to the civil rights movement and its declining influence. "I am devoted to King and I worked with CORE and tried to raise money

My Father's Many Mansions 17 for the Freedom Riders. . . .Yet at the same time in talking to very different people, somewhat older and also talking to ex sit-in students who said, 'No, I simply can't take it any more . . .' I don't know. Let me put it another way. King's influence in the South is slight and the North doesn't talk about the South."14 As Baldwin presents it, by 1961 the civil rights movement and its supporters were experiencing growing frustration.15 With a core of discontented southern activists and a political program unable to respond to the exigencies of black urban discontent, the future of a movement grounded in nonviolent protest seemed tenuous. If Baldwin's remarks can be understood as an illustration of his mindset around the time of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, he approached the black nationalists with a sense that the civil rights platform he supported was becoming an anachronism. In the same interview Baldwin is equally convinced that the NOI's advocacy of racial separatism and black moral superiority captures the imagination of the black public more readily. Responding to the interviewer's claim that it is "much more easy for a ... Muslim speaker to win followers than Martin Luther King," Baldwin accedes that it is "much easier, obviously."16 Vacillating between his sense that the civil rights movement's politics were becoming outmoded on the one hand and his sense that the NOI more accurately addressed black discontent on the other, Baldwin performed the very ambivalence that he attributed to black America.

In My Father's House: Subjectivity and Patriarchal Authority The ambiguities of Baldwin's professed political allegiances extended into his engagement with nationalist gender ideologies. Central to understanding the uneven deployment of gender in Baldwin's analysis of the NOI are the multiple ways that Baldwin manipulates the myths that consolidate patriarchal authority. His evocations of fathers are significant not, as scholar Michel Fabre argues in another context, because Baldwin was engaged in a "therapeutic" search for a spiritual father, but rather because authority and power were constituted through patriarchy in the NOI, in his stepfather's tragic life, and in the church of his youth.17 Situated between the organization's nationalist agenda and Baldwin's public and private anxieties, paternal myth functions as the ideological framework through which Baldwin can represent, inhabit, and interrogate the logic of black nationalism. From the beginning of Baldwin's career, the biography of his stepfather was a fixture in the author's essays and fiction.18 David Baldwin, an itinerant laborer, minister, and father of nine children, led a harsh life in which he often found it difficult to find the means of subsistence for his family.19 A man who his son claims was "indescribably cruel in his personal

18 Chapter 1 life" and "the most bitter man I have ever met," the elder Baldwin embodied in his son's imagination the pernicious effects of internalizing white supremacist ideology.20 According to Baldwin, his father's failing lay not so much in a straightforward acceptance of white domination but in the subtle ways that his religious views reproduced the destructive logic of racial subjection. Baldwin claims that his father "was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart he believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons he became so holy" (18). This commentary casts David Baldwin as a symbol of the perils of internalized racism, but equally important is the claim that David's unyielding faith was a meager defense against an ingrained belief that he was black and therefore inferior. Baldwin develops the latter point further in his depiction of a clash with his father. Bewildered by a crisis of faith at a time when he was also being heralded as one of Harlem's most prodigious young preachers, Baldwin sought to test the boundaries of church doctrine and the authority of his father. In an act of defiance, he invited a Jewish friend to visit him at his father's decidedly Christian house. His father responded by slapping Baldwin "across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back all the hatred and the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me, and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing. I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine was to be tormented forever in hell. . . . The battle between us was in the open, but that was all right; it was almost a relief. A more deadly struggle had begun" (51). The violent prohibition of Baldwin's father certainly illustrates the latter's tyrannical authority, but this authority is also inseparable from the father's faith in a crippling ideology. Through its hierarchical and exclusionary logic, David Baldwin's religion reproduces the very racial categories from which it pretends to extricate its believers. He enacts a mere reversal in which the nonblack and the non-Christian must be degraded in order to establish the supremacy of black Christians. The father's prohibition thereby confirms for Baldwin that nothing has changed and that neither he nor his father has been freed from white supremacy through his faith. Baldwin's violation of paternal authority and the punitive blow that this defiance brings forth mirror and prefigure his conflict with the ideology of the black Pentecostal churches he encountered in Harlem. That is, by tying the father's prohibitive authority to the larger ideology of the church, Baldwin conflates public dogma and private tyranny. In a passage evocatively juxtaposed to his conflict with his father, Baldwin criticizes the church's ideological failing. "It probably occurred to me around this time that the vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection,

My Father's Many Mansions 19 with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. . . . In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted, and in the end hated almost all strangers and despised ourselves" (54-55). Baldwin shrewdly sketches the ideological function of his Pentecostal church's theology. He suggests that his church creates a speculary fiction about black racial superiority that inverts the hierarchy of white supremacy yet never escapes its racial dichotomies. His church's dogma functions like an ideology in that it advances a narrative that assumes that the group's truth claims about racial superiority correlate directly with an objective reality. For the true believers, the mediating function of these representations, the arbitrary relationship between sign and referent, is not to be analyzed, for it is belief in the reality of the sign that constitutes faith.21 By articulating the ideological functions of the church's dogma and outlining the sanctification of the converts' earthly desires, Baldwin demystifies church doctrine in a way that echoes his defiance of his father's authority. In this sense, his criticism of the church's ideology becomes legible only through his efforts to dismantle paternal authority. The essay's analysis of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI is energized by a related corrosion of the ideological underpinnings of paternal authority. As Baldwin reflects on his meeting with Muhammad and his followers, he places particular emphasis on the benevolent patriarchal charisma that Muhammad exudes. He claims that the leader brings "something into the room with him," his "disciples' joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them" (77) ,22 Baldwin goes on to remark his surprise in discovering that Muhammad "teased the women like a father with no hint of that unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches" (77) ,23 And as he describes Muhammad's interactions with his disciples, he "could not help but think of them as his children" (77). Baldwin acknowledges that he finds this patriarchal aura seductive, for Muhammad "made me think of my father and me as we might have been if we had been friends" (78). These images of doting children basking in the graces of their father represent Muhammad as a leader whose charismatic appeal is contingent on his status as the organization's benevolent patriarch. At the same time, by linking Muhammad to his own father, Baldwin associates Muhammad with a paternal authority that he has already marked as fundamentally authoritarian. It is the essay's ability to simultaneously acknowledge the powerful appeal of Muhammad's patriarchal leadership while tracing its limitations that gives rhetorical force to his dissent. Baldwin certainly performs his deference to Muhammad as the father of the NOI, but he is also disturbed that allegiance to this patriarchal

20 Chapter 1 authority demands a relinquishment of individual autonomy. Initially, Baldwin claims to be pleased as he observes the love shown Muhammad by his subjects, but this scene takes on a sinister cast as his description continues: "Whenever Elijah spoke, a kind of chorus arose from the table saying 'Yes, that's right.' This began to set my teeth on edge. And Elijah himself had a further unnerving habit, which was to ricochet his questions and comments off someone else on their way to you. Now, turning to the man on his right, he began to speak of the white devils with whom I had last appeared on TV: What had they made him (me) feel? . . . Elijah went on about the crimes of white people to this endless chorus of 'yes, that's right'" ( 79). As Muhammad produces an ideological position, his subjects echo his sentiments, uniting the paternal leader and his disciples through interpellative rituals. If an essential appeal of the NOI was in what Baldwin describes as Muhammad's "peculiar authority, how his smile promised to take the burdens off my shoulders," then this virtue also produces a constituency in which each individual's identity merely reflects the dictates of the patriarch (78). Baldwin's suspicions regarding the NOI converts' lack of autonomy play out further in his interaction with one of Muhammad's disciples. In a conversation with this young man, Baldwin asks him about some of the pragmatic issues that building a separate black nation would involve, yet Baldwin quickly discovers that the logistics of nation formation do not constitute the substance of the NOFs appeal. Neither the question of "how we Negroes were to get this land" nor the question of "what happens when the Negro is no longer part" of the U.S. economy fuel the convert's allegiance (93). "The boy could see that freedom depended on the possession of land; he was persuaded that, in one way or another, Negroes must have this possession. In the meantime, he could walk the streets and fear nothing, because there were millions like him, coming soon now to power. He was held together in short by a dream—though it is just as well to remember that some dreams come true—and was united with his brothers on the basis of their color. . . . People always seem to band together on some principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility" (94-95). Bound to the ideology passed down to him by Elijah Muhammad, the young man stands as Baldwin's illustration of the subject who has surrendered himself fully to patriarchal authority. Because the ideology itself, the dream of a separate nation, is part of the very narrative that keeps the boy "held together," producing him as a cohesive subject, he cannot question its premises. For the convert, fashioning himself as one of many subjects who believes in the nation's emergence seems to be a sufficient political end in itself. At the core of Baldwin's quarrel with the NOI, then, is an anxiety about an ideology in which male subjects are constituted by myths they do not question and captured by

My Father's Many Mansions 21 a dream of liberation in which the practical realities of its attainment are not consequential. As Baldwin laments, "I could have hoped that the Muslim movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth, so that Negroes in the Northern ghetto could begin in concrete terms . . . to change their situation" (95). Given Baldwin's considerable reservations, it is probably no accident that the author concludes his description by staging his flight from the father's house. Playing with the concept of the house as the locus of the father's law, he presents his departure at the door of Muhammad's Chicago mansion. "I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fury, and yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine—we would always be strangers, and possibly one day enemies. The car arrived. . . . He walked into the mansion and shut the door" (92-93). Framing this ideological schism as a mythic divide between the prodigal son and his father, the passage expresses the kind of ambivalence toward Muhammad that led one of Baldwin's contemporaries to label the author a "gray flannel Muslim."24 Still, his very ambivalence makes his final rejection of Muhammad all the more powerful. His refusal to simply be subsumed by Muhammad's patriarchal authority—despite its seductiveness—suspends its interpellative legitimacy. Thus Baldwin represents himself as a subject who constantly interrogates the ideological expression of patriarchy and the power it wields over those interpellated by it. And it is this kind of critical dismantling of the father's authority that makes him a stranger and an enemy to Elijah Muhammad. In exploring his anxieties about Muhammad's nationalism, Baldwin touches upon essential strains in NOI philosophy. First anointed as a prophetic "messenger" by the group's founder, Fard Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad took over the NOI shortly after Fard's disappearance in 1934.25 Elijah Muhammad preached to his black American audience a redemptive combination of prophecy about the downfall of a corrupt white race, affirmation of the inherent righteousness of the black race, and exhortation to form a geographically separate black nation. As the group's messenger and central theologian, Elijah Muhammad created an elaborate theocracy predicated on the notion that Fard was God incarnate come to Earth to save the lost black population of the United States. In this cosmology, the God who made the world is not a spirit but a black man who also sired the original men of the Earth, "the Asian Black Nation" the "Tribe of Shabazz."26 Muhammad insists that the "Original Man" is "none other than the Black Man. He is the first and the last, and maker

22 Chapter 1 and owner of the universe" (53). A canny rewriting of Islamic and Christian theology, Muhammad's doctrine redefines the black man as both God and the divine son of God. Muhammad preaches, "[I]t was your fathers who created the heavens and the earth" and only by returning to this original mode of being could one become emancipated (31-32, 42). In this sense, the NOFs entire cosmology and concept of freedom is inseparable from the construction of a redemptive patriarchal myth. It is unlikely that Baldwin had access to the NOI documents outlining the group's patriarchal dogma explicitly, yet his arguments glean the political reality that the identities of male converts were constituted by a network of paternal ideologies and rituals. Through regimented commitment to the philosophy and daily habits of the NOI, the believer was promised a state of selfhood that would ensure his freedom and political power. The transformation of black male subjectivity was so central to the organization's emancipatory mission that Muhammad dedicated a full chapter to his exhortation that the "Original Man" must "know thyself" (3165). Muhammad professes, "[I]t is knowledge of self that the so-called Negroes lack which keeps them from enjoying freedom, justice and equality. This belongs to them divinely as much as it does to other nations of earth" (31). From Muhammad's purely theocratic assertion that "Allah has decided to place us on top with a thorough knowledge of self and his guidance" to his claim that "Allah has given me our proper names," the locus of the NOI's emancipatory promise lay in transforming the selfhood of black men (32, 34). No other ritual so eloquently captured the centrality of reinventing black male subjects as the group's process of renaming. A ritual designed by Muhammad, each convert was instructed to replace his Christian name with an X that signified "'the mystery confronting the Negro as to who he was before the white man made him a slave and put a European label on him.'"27Once converts showed adequate devotion to the organization's strict regulations regarding diet and comportment, Muhammad granted the men what biographer Claude Clegg III terms "their original (Arabic) names."28 Sanctified by Allah's divine authority, this ritual reconstruction of the proselyte in a sense re-created him as the son of Elijah Muhammad and Allah. Thus the organization forged a circuit of mutually reinforcing ideologies and practices that consolidated Muhammad's authority through a reconstruction of discrete male subjects. It is this tangled skein of self-fashioning and sanctified authority that Baldwin's work navigates and challenges. But while Baldwin highlights the dangers that NOI ideology posed for male converts, he virtually leaves unexamined the role that women played in the organization. One important illustration of this marginalization of women occurs when Baldwin describes his arrival at Muhammad's house. He claims, "[T]he women were carrying on their own conversation, in low

My Father's Many Mansions 23 tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversation. A few women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations for dinner" (76). Though Baldwin notes that the NOI imposed a strict hierarchy in which women were relegated to domestic labor and barred from public politics, he does not explore this phenomenon with the same rigor that he applies to the crisis of the young male convert. By not examining the link between the NOI's hierarchical vision of gender and the consolidation of patriarchal authority, he allows the presumption that the black man is the natural subject and object of emancipatory politics to persist unchallenged. Baldwin's lack of attentiveness to the NOI's gender asymmetry is so striking because much of his work before 1964 demonstrated that he was capable of a more thorough analysis of how masculinist and patriarchal ideologies limited the social autonomy of women. For instance, in 1963 Baldwin conceded that masculine entitlement was a problematic feature of black political rhetoric. His friend and colleague Lorraine Hansberry reminded him of black men's troublesome tendency to conflate manhood and political power. Shortly after Baldwin, Hansberry, and a number of other highly visible civil rights supporters met with attorney general Robert Kennedy, she cautioned against the plea to save black manhood. According to Baldwin, Hansberry "said that she wasn't too concerned about Negro Manhood since they had managed to endure and even transcend fantastic things."29 Her true concerns were about political power, for "she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those five policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too."30 In evoking the image of a black female body being subjected to violent state repression, Hansberry and Baldwin highlighted both the centrality of female agitation to the civil rights movement and the segregationists' obliviousness to gender distinctions as such. Baldwin's acute commentary on the ways that gender ideologies adversely affect women also appears in his seminal essay on Andre Gide. His "Gide as Homosexual and Husband" takes the French author to task for depriving his wife, Madeline, of any autonomous sexual desire, converting her into "an ideal" an "Emmanuele, God-with us."31 More than a personal attack on Gide, per se, the essay criticizes a "powerful masculinity," an ideology that prevents a woman like Madeline from ever realizing any sense of either sexual autonomy or "her womanhood and its right to flower."32 The piece reveals Baldwin's clear consciousness that masculinist ideology could subordinate the autonomy of women in a pernicious manner. In addition, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), goes to great lengths to track the ways that patriarchal authority diminishes the life possibilities of black women. While the novel never poses an explicit

24 Chapter 1 alternative to the patriarchal social arrangements that pervade the Grimes family, the text explicitly maps the tyranny of this paternal authority. Telling the story of the Grimes family, the frustrated patriarch Gabriel, his wayward sons, and his beleaguered sister Florence, the novel provides a compelling indictment of a patriarch's overarching authority. Recounting the family's impoverished origins in the Jim Crow South, the narrator calls attention to the way that Gabriel's mother privileges his entitlements at the expense of his sister Florence. "If he had never been born, Florence might have looked forward to a day when she would be released from her unrewarding round of labor, when she might think of her own future and go out and make it. With the birth of Gabriel, which occurred when she was five, her future was swallowed up. There was only one childhood in that house and it was Gabriel's—to which, since Gabriel was a man-child, all else was sacrificed. Her mother did not, indeed, think of it as sacrifice but as logic."33 The novel frames Gabriel's entitlement as a male heir and future patriarch as necessarily contingent upon Florence's truncated life chances, so that while Gabriel and his mother seek to create a "royal" patriarchal line to redeem their peasant origins, the novel itself disrupts such a project by telling the story of Florence's shattered bid for autonomy.34 With an unusual incisiveness, this text provides a discursive map of how patriarchal entitlement is linked to women's subordination. One can therefore understand Baldwin's marginal treatment of women within the NOI as a failure to substantively analyze the inequality that he took issue with in his earlier work. Had Baldwin been more attentive to the gender asymmetry within the NOI, he might have articulated a more comprehensive portrait of how gender ideologies shaped the NOI's overall agenda. Baldwin's contemporary, C. Eric Lincoln, suggests in his 1961 study of the NOI that the organization framed its ability to restore traditional gender roles as a benchmark of its politics.35 For instance, Elijah Muhammad emphasized that male control of female autonomy and sexuality was essential to the creation of a black nation. Muhammad claimed that "the woman is the man's field to produce his nation. If he does not keep the enemy out of his field, he won't produce a good nation" (58). In a similar vein, Muhammad demanded that black men "stop our women" from "bleaching, powdering, and ironing their hair; painting their lips, cheeks and eyebrows; wearing shorts; going half-nude in public places" (60). Policing women's sexuality, limiting their access to public spaces, and regimenting their self-fashioning all became part of Muhammad's national strategy to "put our people on top of the world" (61). Thus, in comparison, Baldwin's cursory gloss of women's status in the organization prevented the fulfillment of the more sharply critical gender politics he began in his early work.

My Father's Many Mansions 25 The excesses that Baldwin failed to confront would be more fully realized in the work of figures such as Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. One way to reread Malcolm's autobiography is as a text that, like Baldwin's, represents the hunger for patriarchal authority even as that impulse undoes itself. Whether in Malcolm's linking of himself to a lineage of male nationalists through his father and Marcus Garvey or in his "adoration" and "worship" of Elijah Muhammad, this text routes its nationalism through the patriarchal.36 Seldom addressed, however, are the ways in which Malcolm's ousting from the NOI also produced an extraordinary crisis in the legitimacy of patriarchal nationalism. This crisis is evidenced when Malcolm presents Muhammad's rejection of him as more severe than execution: "The thing to me that was worse than death was the betrayal. I could conceive death I couldn't conceive betrayal—not of the loyalty which I had given to the Nation of Islam, and to Mr. Muhammad" (312). The betrayal exceeds death in that it announces the end of patriarchy's capacity to serve as an adequate interpellative structure for the subject or the black nation. And even though Malcolm never fully interrogates his own investment in paternal authority, his text also never fully recovers its aura of sublime insurgency. Malcolm's more ambivalent repudiation was taken up more aggressively by Newton. His autobiography issues a devastating critique of patriarchy as a mode of self-fashioning. Describing his own father's ongoing struggle to support a family, Newton asserts, "I began to see that the bourgeois family can be an imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating experience."37 Repudiating the nuclear family as the grounds for his radicalism, Newton instead argues that the Black Panther's "communal life" provides a radical alternative. If marriage produces "contradictions" that bind the oppressed to the dominant order, the party's "unity transformed us to the point where we have not compromised with the system; we have the closeness and love of family life, the will to survive in spite of cruel conditions. We feel free as a group; we know what troubles us and we act."38 Newton posits communal identity and oppositional group consciousness as an effective revolt against bourgeois hegemony. Both Newton's critique and the crisis of patriarchal legitimacy staged by Malcolm X suggest that Baldwin's dissent from the NOI was a founding moment in an ongoing interrogation of patriarchy's political limits. Though The Fire Next Time did not fully address the limitations of this discourse with respect to women, it did build a significant alternative to the willful submission that the group advocated. Through a narrative representing the history of black responses to political tyranny, Baldwin outlined his own model of emancipatory selfhood: "This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to look behind the words. If one is continually surviving

26 Chapter 1 the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. . . . The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of life of generations of Negroes, and it helps explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school" (113). Although one would not want to ignore the ways in which this model of subjectivity is also infused with Baldwin's own fantasies about the black male subject, one can also see that he produces a portrait of emancipatory subjectivity quite distinct from that of the NOI. Baldwin's subject engages in a rigorous dialectical analysis of received social ideologies. Taking "nothing for granted," this subject presumes the constructed nature of the language that shapes his being and persistently seeks the motivations behind human discourses. Like Baldwin himself, who questions the underlying assumption of the NOI's patriarchal nationalism, this subject is not susceptible to the complete surrender of autonomy that he identifies in NOI disciples. Baldwin elaborates this model of selfhood in a section of the essay that addresses the white citizenry's dangerous perpetuation of black disenfranchisement and dispossession. In this formulation he links the freedom of white and black subjects to the unraveling of the received ideologies that reify subjectivity. As he asserts, "most people guard and keep; they suppose it is themselves that they are guarding, whereas what they are guarding and keeping is their system of reality" (100). He goes on to argue that one "can give nothing whatever without risking one's self. If one cannot risk one's self, then one is simply incapable of giving. And after all one can give freedom only by setting someone free" (100).The "risk" that is crucial to Baldwin's notion of freedom requires that the subject abandon or question the ideologies that make identity a stable, manifest reality.39 Baldwin's claim that freedom is a condition contingent upon the subject's ability to dialectically engage interpellative discourse also resonates with his vision of the artist's social function. In an aesthetic tract published in 1964, he argues, "A society must assume that it is stable, but . the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven."40 Moreover, the artist "must not and cannot take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides."41 Like his ideal liberated subject, the artist is uniquely charged with the task of dismantling received truth claims. Engaged in what Baldwin calls a "lover's war," the artist's mission is to "reveal the beloved [i.e., society] to himself and with that revelation, to make freedom real."42 In this model Baldwin suggests that freedom is made manifest through the artist's dynamic and critical engagement with the ideologies that concretize human subjectivity.

My Father's Many Mansions 27 Despite the fact that Baldwin's model of self-fashioning counters the patriarchal ideology of the NOI, this form of selfhood is inseparable from his own preoccupation with male selfhood. He defines his commitment to a rigorous skepticism by representing a history of black communal subjugation that had an especially traumatic effect on black men: "that man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his efforts, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable" (112-13). The construction of a new kind of masculine subjectivity is elemental in Baldwin's identity politics. It is the "manhood" of the male subject that is imperiled by a history of white supremacist tyranny. Baldwin does not necessarily advocate the return of patriarchy with its coterie of paternal laws and rituals, but he does seem to long for the reproduction of a specifically masculine authority. When Baldwin links his alternative notions of selfhood to "unshakable authority" and "manhood," he contradicts his more radical notion of the self as an engaged critic whose identity would necessarily be in constant flux. Notwithstanding these ambiguities, Baldwin left us with a provocative and subtle critique of an organization that became a model for nationalists in the Black Power era. Rather than liberating NOI members from the tyranny of white supremacy, this ideology asks that proselytes surrender their capacity to question the pragmatic politics of the organization at the most fundamental level. For Baldwin, true liberation necessarily involved the subject's capacity to interrogate the received social fictions that endow subjectivity with coherence and stability. Because of this ideological divide, Baldwin became one of the first intellectuals to critically engage the link between gender and political liberation that was to become a fixture of the Black Power movement. Had Baldwin been more consistent in maintaining his skepticism, he might have become one of the era's most comprehensive critics of the movement's gender politics. Baldwin's work before 1964 demonstrated frequently that he was well aware that foregrounding masculine and patriarchal redemption could potentially foil the grand political aspirations of a people.

Masculine Alliance and the New Political Order During the first half of the 1960s, Baldwin suspected that the gradualist reform politics of the civil rights movement were becoming politically irrelevant, but the violent assault on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his constituents in the later half of the decade only confirmed his suspicions. Using former Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael as an embodiment of the shift in black politics,

28 Chapter 1 Baldwin asserts, "I first met Stokely in the Deep South when he was just another non-violent kid, marching, talking, and getting his head whipped. This time now seems as far behind us as the flood."43 Although the period between these remarks and the 1963 March on Washington was a mere five years, in his mind the world had been dramatically altered in the interim. Carmichael's shift from his position as the former head of the SNCC to architect of Black Power ideology seemed to Baldwin like irrefutable evidence that a political divide had been crossed. With the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the visible dissolution of the civil rights platform, the cause Baldwin once supported could no longer serve as a viable political alternative to Black Power. Moreover, the violent backlash against the civil rights movement led Baldwin to bestow a moral authority on the nationalists of the late sixties that he had not ceded entirely to the NOI. Narrating his version of how the civil rights platform disintegrated, a frustrated and demoralized Baldwin claims, "if those suffering boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised."44 Not only did the militant politics of black nationalists such as Stokely Carmichael seem inevitable and therefore palatable to Baldwin but also the attacks on civil rights workers justified the turn toward a more militant politics. The extent of the license Baldwin was willing to grant the emerging Black Power leadership is revealed as he claims, "I may not always agree with Stokely's views or the ways in which he expresses them," yet "my agreement or disagreement is absolutely irrelevant." The more pressing concern was that "I get his message."45 Whereas Baldwin's analysis of the NOI carefully points out the dangers of the group's patriarchal authoritarianism, he minimizes the relevance of any ideological differences with Carmichael. In addition to granting the young leadership of the Black Power movement a rather long ideological leash, Baldwin viewed his relationship to these figures in terms dramatically distinct from his adversarial encounter with Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. When asked to consider the development of Black Power politics in a 1967 interview, Baldwin's response was as much a defense of the movement as it was an analysis: "A great deal of hysterical and indefensible nonsense has been written about Black Power. It is a phrase which refers to an honored (!) canon of Western thought: the self-determination of peoples. It means nothing more than that."46 He punctuates this defense with his imperative that blacks "must save ourselves if we can; and if we can save ourselves, we can also save our country."47 Baldwin's rhetoric crudely echoes the call for autonomous control of black communities issued by Stokely Carmichael and other activists, but neither the subtleties that characterized the ideological distinctions

My Father's Many Mansions 29 between factions of Black Power nor the explicit strategies for attaining political autonomy appear in Baldwin's response. And it is the repression of such distinctions that allows Baldwin to publicly transform himself from a skeptical critic of the initial turn toward black nationalism into a staunch ally of the Black Power movement. A public letter that Baldwin wrote on behalf of Stokely Carmichael further dramatizes Baldwin's desire to reinvent himself as a member of a united front. At the request of the black journal Freedom-ways, Baldwin's defense of Carmichael, "A Letter to Americans," was read to a capacity audience at Carnegie Hall for the W. E. B. Du Bois centennial celebration. The document indicts the American government for dispossessing Carmichael of his passport as a means of halting the activist's efforts to align himself with hostile foreign powers. Upon Carmichael's return from political trips to both Cuba and North Vietnam, U.S. officials confiscated his passport and placed him under house arrest.48 The highly publicized event offered Baldwin a key opportunity to negotiate and codify the terms of his relationship to the new generation of Black Power activists. In so doing, Baldwin linked Carmichael to a history of African American political struggle. "[I]t was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokely—as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing—coined the phrase, Black Power. He didn't coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it's been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank. I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with Black Power."49 Baldwin represents the Black Power movement as a manifestation of an African American resistance extant since the first African encounters with the New World. Not only historical and temporal distinctions are expunged in this formulation but ideological and political differences as well. Baldwin depicts Carmichael and Black Power as actors within a seamless continuum of New World political struggles. Within Baldwin's broader reinvention of himself, masculinity became a key term through which he negotiated and maintained this alliance. The suppression of Baldwin's suspicions about the perils of conflating masculine authority and political power may have been hastened by the direct attacks leveled at him by vocal Black Power ideologues. The most widely discussed and infamous of these assaults is of course Eldridge Cleaver's "Notes on a Native Son."50 Depicting Baldwin's work as symptomatic of "the self flagellating policy of Martin Luther King," Cleaver created a foil against which he defined the politics of a more militant generation.51 A linchpin in Cleaver's argument is his claim that Baldwin's homosexuality rendered him incapable of adequately resisting the tyranny of white supremacy: The "white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits

30 Chapter 1 to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big Daddy, he focuses on 'whiteness' all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against 'blackness'—upon himself, what he is, and all those who look like him, remind him of himself."52 Cleaver operates within a sexual economy that historians and theorists of sexuality refer to as inversion. From the late nineteenth century forward, a whole set of discursive and social practices have evolved to produce the homosexual subject as one whose gender is inverted.53 Historian George Chauncey argues that within such a logic "one had an identity based on one's gender identity rather than a sexual identity or even a sexuality; one's sexual behavior was thought to be necessarily determined by one's gender identity."54 Recapitulating this discourse, Cleaver argues that Baldwin's homosexuality is the product of an internal femininity. The distinctive wrinkle in Cleaver's reproduction of this sexual discourse is that he maps Baldwin's political affiliations onto it. Cleaver writes Baldwin's investment in the civil rights movement's interracial coalition politics as a manifestation of the author's internal feminization. Through this evocation of the gender inversion thesis, Cleaver feminizes both Baldwin as a political figure and the civil rights movement in general. While Cleaver's sensational charge was only one of several attacks leveled at Baldwin by Black Power activists, Baldwin's effort to gloss over the implications of the attack in his public remarks suggests how profoundly invested he became in maintaining a veneer of solidarity with Black Power advocates.55 According to Baldwin biographers, he was deeply outraged by Cleaver's essay privately and frequently expressed misgivings about Black Power ideology, yet he never publicly mounted the kind of elaborate critique of these political advocates that he marshaled against the NOI.56 His meditative work No Name in the Street (1972) describes a 1967 meeting with Eldridge Cleaver and Newton. Baldwin carefully rationalizes the Cleaver attack. While Baldwin "didn't like what he had to say about me at all," he "admired the book" and felt Cleaver to be "valuable and rare."57 Baldwin is sympathetic to Cleaver's hostility and "could see why" Cleaver "felt impelled to issue what was, in fact, a warning: he was being a zealous watchman on the city wall and I do not say that with a sneer" (171). But even more telling is the manner in which Baldwin addresses Cleaver's claims about homosexuality: "I was confused in his [Cleaver's] mind with the unutterable debasement of the male—with all those faggots, punks and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison must have made him vomit more than once" (171-72). Affirming the abject status of the sexual invert, yet locating himself outside it, Baldwin legitimated Cleaver's sexual logic. Furthermore, by negating his internal femininity, Baldwin also positioned himself as a decidedly masculine subject and validated the assertion that masculinity was essential to one's participation in Black Power politics.

My Father's Many Mansions 31 Baldwin's participation in the production of a category of abject homosexual subjects speaks to the transformative effect that the masculinist imperatives of the Black Power movement had on his thinking. In other contexts he had made trenchant criticisms of heterosexual discourses that reference the figure of the homosexual in order to naturalize heterosexuality itself.58 Only a year after the publication of his response to Cleaver, he would argue that "straight cats invent faggots so that they can sleep with them and not become faggots themselves."59 He powerfully refutes the inversion thesis that equates sexual identification and gender.60 Given his sophisticated dismantling of the discourses that produce normative sexuality, his response to Cleaver seems remarkably incomplete. And though Baldwin's exact motivations in each instance are difficult to isolate, it seems clear that the pressure to affirm the masculinist ideology of the Panthers would have militated against the manifestation of his more complex analysis of the invert. Black Power ideology was no less pivotal in fostering a more aggressive articulation of masculinist discourse in Baldwin's work. The essays in No Name in the Street defend the Black Panther Party by more emphatic affirmation of the linkage between masculinity and power. Responding to the repressive strategies the state used to undermine the Panthers, Baldwin submits, "Nothing more thoroughly reveals the actual intentions of this country, domestically and globally than the ferocity of the repression, the storm of fire and blood which the Panthers have been forced to undergo merely for declaring themselves as men—men who want "'land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace'" (167). The final lines in this passage refer directly to the Panthers' "Ten Point Program," an outline of the group's primary political agenda. Baldwin emphasizes some of the more nebulous objectives in the program, leaving out issues concerning representation in the United Nations, a demand to free incarcerated prisoners, and a call to stop police violence in black communities.61 Baldwin is not so much engaged with the Panthers' political program as he is with their declaration of themselves as "men." The abrupt dashes between "declaring themselves as men" and the excerpt from the Panther program underline that it is the Panthers' declaration of their masculinity that Baldwin defends. That is, "men who want 'land, bread, housing,'" and so forth is attached to the sentence as though it were an afterthought. By reproducing a discourse that placed the affirmation of masculinity at the forefront of politics, Baldwin reinforced the masculinist logic of the Panthers and positioned himself as an ally of the organization. Baldwin's aggressive evocation of the masculine was further evidenced in a heightened phallocentrism in his work. Reflecting on his journey to the South in the 1950s, Baldwin claims that "[e]very black man walking in this country pays a tremendous price for walking: for men are not

32 Chapter 1 women, and a man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs" (64). He goes on to proclaim that "all men" know that "a man without balls is not a man; that the word genesis describes the male, involves the phallus, and refers to the seed of life" (64). Following these conventional assertions about the inherently phallic quality of masculinity, Baldwin concludes that "the world in which we live is, after all, a reflection of the desires and activities of men" (66). He had occasionally presumed the linkage between masculinity and political authority in his early work but had never declared this relationship through such a phallocentric notion of the masculine self. His account of male sexual difference articulates more easily with Cleaver's fetishization of male genitalia than Baldwin's writings before 1964. Baldwin's work to establish alliances with Black Power advocates through masculinist discourse was so transformative that eventually it compelled a revision of his long-standing critique of patriarchal social logics. Indeed, his 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk is utterly phallic and patriarchal in its attempt to tell the story of a young impoverished couple and the birth of their child. The Baldwin who had written so eloquently about the patriarchal ideologies that restricted the autonomy of Florence Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain later created a novel in which the black patriarch is the salvation of a young pregnant black woman. Despite the fact that the father of the baby, an aspiring sculptor named Fonny, is incarcerated, Tish finds hope in her father's joyous approval of the pregnancy. While being consoled by her father as she sits in his lap, Tish is centrally concerned with her father's sanction. "I was his daughter alright: I had found someone to love and he was released and verified. That child in my belly was after all, his child, too, for if there had been no Tish there would have been no Joseph. Our laughter in that kitchen, then was our helpless response to a miracle. That baby was our baby, it was on its way, my father's great hand on my belly held it and warmed it.... Love had sent it, spinning out of us. Where that might take us, no one knew: but now my father, Joe, was ready."62 It is the father's willingness to accept the child as his heir and not her own limited prospects that are her primary concern. While the child is conceived out of wedlock and therefore illegitimate, the scene replaces conventional paternity with a paternal order that transcends biological order and social convention. The baby is "spinning out of us" as though the father actually participates in the creation of the child. In this crude play on the biblical story of Mary and Joseph, Baldwin, who had once mapped the restrictive logic of patriarchal social arrangements, rewrites patriarchy as a source of security, stability, and continuity. Superficially, this tale of a young couple struggling to survive and triumph through their love seems to bear little relationship to black

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radicalism, but by examining the origins of the novel, one can imagine how its patriarchal focus was directly linked to Baldwin's relationship to radicalism. Baldwin informed a New York Times reporter in 1972 that an early draft of the novel "deals with a black revolutionary in an American jail whose pregnant wife gives birth to their son at the instant the father is slain."63 In the process of revision the explicit treatment of Black Power radicalism was dropped, and the revolutionary became Tish's falsely incarcerated lover. It is not clear why Baldwin ultimately abandoned the more explicitly political version of the novel in favor of a love story. Yet by imagining the palimpsest of the black revolutionary's narrative inscribed beneath the tale of Tish and Fonny, one can recover the relay between this love story and Baldwin's alliance with Black Power. The text's erasure of Baldwin's hostility toward patriarchal politics is underwritten by his initial impulse to write a heroic narrative about a Black Power revolutionary who fathers a child. Just as Tish becomes a vessel through which Baldwin encodes his investment in the patriarchal, she is also an object through which he writes Fonny's development as a masculine subject. As Tish narrates the novel, she explicates the nature of her lover's subjectivity. Observing Fonny while he interacts with a group of Latino men, she claims that a woman "must watch and guide" a man as the man matures, "but he must always lead and he will always appear to be giving far more attention to his comrades than he is giving to her."64 Tish enunciates her own subordination with her claim that "a woman is literally controlled by what the man's imagination makes of her—literally hour by hour, day by day: so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman's."65 This characterization of the female as the absence of autonomy and interiority reproduces a well-worn premise of patriarchal logic.66 In essence, this portrait of women as a sex without the ability to form subjectivity except through the male imagination is a more accurate description of Baldwin's own aesthetic appropriation of female subjectivity than the self-evident truth it pretends to be. In this regard, Baldwin's collusion with Black Power achieves one of its most robust articulations through his appropriation of the female voice. Baldwin's bond with black radicals peaked in his relationship with Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Scale. The conspicuous presence of masculinist discourse in the published accounts of their relationship is particularly revelatory, for these accounts were written in the late seventies, long after the Black Power movement had effectively dissolved. The persistence of such discourse even at this late date speaks to the enduring effects of the Black Power era's masculinist ideology in Baldwin's work. Seale and Baldwin had only crossed paths sporadically during the late sixties, yet according to the former, Baldwin agreed to "share his literary

34 Chapter 1 insights" regarding Scale's autobiography and eventually gave the book its title, A Lonely Rage.67 The narrative itself charts Scale's growth from an awkward and feckless teenager to his emergence as second in command of the nation's most visible black radical organization. Indeed, at times the book seems to ask readers to collapse the account of Scale's personal attainment of manhood and his development as a political actor. This conflation is clear in a passage in which Scale recounts the birth of his son Malik Nkrumah Stagolee Scale. "All in all I could feel myself developing to a great culmination point. Having birthed a son, and now being on the road to doing something about the situation of black people in society, bolstered my feelings of virility to an all time high. Even the natural act of lovemaking became ecstasy, as though I had finally suppressed my latent beliefs of the act being sinful. This native began to know and love his oppressed class brothers with an insight and need to care. . . . 'We' and 'our' became part of my everyday language; deep feelings of share and share alike enhanced my phrases."68 Distinct from the aggressively patriarchal rhetoric of Elijah Muhammad, Scale's formulation does not relate sexual reproduction to nation formation as such. The birth of the son, the emergence of Scale's sexual virility, the abandonment of Protestant sexual taboos, and the emergence of a racialized political consciousness are all signifiers of Scale's own masculine becoming. That is, these various registers of experience signify a coherent set of events only to the degree that their end product is a potent masculine subject. In his foreword to Scale's book, Baldwin loses no opportunity to stress his affinity for the masculine becoming that is a primary theme of Scale's autobiography. Titling his brief introductory essay "Stagolee," Baldwin celebrates the fact that Bobby Scale takes the black folklore hero as a "model" of being. Historian Lawrence Levine points out that Stagolee is one of the great "badmen" of African American folklore, a virtually immoral figure who takes women at will and murders without a second thought.69 The subject of African American songs, toasts, and vernacular traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present, Stagolee served as an outlet for the vengeful fantasies of disfranchised black Americans.70 Given this history, one can see in Baldwin's celebration of Scale's self-fashioning a latter-day attempt to craft a unitary myth of black solidarity. But more important is the way that Baldwin sanctions the masculinist self-fashioning that Scale's admiration of Stagolee represents. Baldwin concludes his foreword with the pronouncement that the "beacon lit for his generation, in 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama, by an anonymous black woman, elicited an answering fire from all the wretched, all over the earth, signaled the beginning of the end of the racial nightmare and helped Stagolee, the black folk hero Bobby takes for his model, to achieve his manhood. For it is that tremendous journey which Bobby's book is about: the act of

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assuming and becoming one's self."71 Whereas Baldwin was utterly at odds with the NOI's notion of "becoming one's self," he applauded Scale's masculine self-fashioning as a triumph. The passage operates under a logic similar to that found in Scale's text in that even the presence of black women in the civil rights movement becomes part of a teleology that ends in the full realization of black manhood. Thus, well into the late 1970s, Baldwin's public statements were so deeply infused with Black Power ideology that at times one is hard pressed to distinguish his masculinist rhetoric from that of the young leadership. Perhaps one way to understand this shift is through Baldwin's own growing perception of himself as a paternal presence in the lives of younger activists. That is, as he became the elder statesman to younger activists, he also became more susceptible to the patriarchy he had so often decried.

Turnabout within the Turnabout: Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone Though Baldwin wedded himself to Black Power politics in his public statements of the late 1960s, his fiction in this period reveals a far more complex attitude toward the black artist's obligation to radical politics. His Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone recounts the life of Leo Proudhammer, a second-generation Caribbean American who rises from the slums of Harlem to achieve international acclaim as an actor. The narrative moves from World War II through the civil rights and Black Power movements, allowing the novel to explore the impact of social transformations through the interpersonal experiences of a single character. Indeed, social movements often play themselves out within Leo's intimate relationships in an allegorical fashion. His father's frustrated nationalism is symptomatic of the Garveyite nationalism of the 1920s. His interracial love affair with a white actress works through the political complexities of the civil rights era. And his love affair with a young black man facilitates an exploration of the black artist's obligation to Black Power ideology. That the ambiguity of Baldwin's alliance with Black Power radicals has not been sufficiently addressed is in part a consequence of the broad neglect of Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone. Condemned by reviewers of the day as overly "polemical fiction," the novel confirmed for many critics that Baldwin's powers as a fiction writer were waning.72 The perception that the novel is flawed aesthetically was essential to its reception in the late sixties, and this factor has no doubt contributed to its persistent marginalization.73 Moreover, despite the presence in the current academic climate of what Dwight McBride aptly terms "a Baldwin revival of sorts," this novel is remarkably underrepresented in the criticism.74 Even as scholars have expressed keen interest in issues of sexuality and race in

36 Chapter 1 Baldwin's work, they have focused almost exclusively on his early writing.75 Whether the basis for this neglect is aesthetic or otherwise, the end result is the oversimplification of Baldwin's ties to Black Power. The narrative's presentation of twentieth-century nationalism provides a critical brief against the argument that Baldwin was entirely complicit in the agenda of Black Power. As a youth, Leo is uncomfortably cloaked in the nationalist fantasies of his father, an exiled and "ruined Barbados peasant."76 The father inserts himself and his sons in a noble lineage of black "kings who had never been slaves. He spoke to us of tribes and emperors, battles, victories, and monarchs of whom we had never heard" (12). But Leo and his older brother flounder within the incongruity between the mythic history their father constructs and the material poverty of their lived experience in Harlem. "[I]n the stifling room of his pretensions and expectations we stumbled wretchedly about stubbing our toes, as it were, on rubies, scraping our shins on gold caskets, bringing down with a childish cry the splendid purple tapestry on which, in gold and scarlet our destinies and our inheritance were written. . . . If our father was of royal blood and we were royal children, our father was certainly the only person in the world who knew it" (12). This portrait of a patriarch committed to redeeming his impoverished existence through a foundational myth clearly echoes both Baldwin's Go Tell It on theMounain and his obsessive relationship with his own father. Moreover, the nationalist fantasy of Leo's father is not unlike that of the NOI in that it depends on the construction of a patriarchal male lineage in which a true believer can insert himself and be redeemed. Also crucial in the novel's presentation of black nationalism before 1964 is Leo's observation that the black "pride" and "magic incantations" of Leo's father "neither healed nor saved" (11). In a novel published at the height of Baldwin's public efforts to cast himself as benevolent patron to nationalists like Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers, Baldwin continued to raise serious skepticism about the redemptive merits of patriarchal nationalism. The novel's ambivalence toward black nationalist ideology further unfolds in its depiction of the middle-aged Leo Proudhammer's love affair with a young radical named Christopher Hall. Although their relationship begins when Christopher becomes Leo's "bodyguard," in fact it is Leo who ultimately provides shelter and support for Christopher's radical politics. When Christopher tells Leo of his plan to school "the people in the streets" in his brand of nationalist politics, Leo replies, "we'll try to make you ready" (361). Playing the role of Christopher's "Big Daddy" and his "dirty old man," Leo becomes lover and patron to the young radical (337, 339). Leo affirms his paternal benevolence by providing Christopher with financial backing and a home so that the younger man "felt

My Father's Many Mansions 37 safe, he had a friend, he was valued. He could say what he liked, he could be what he was. It was I must say very beautiful and it made up for a lot" (349). Leo understands a key function of his patronage to be the fostering of Christopher's evolving identity. His focus on the aesthetically pleasing manner in which he allows Christopher to be "what he was" and his desire to make Christopher "ready" reiterate Baldwin's own fascination with the masculine self-affirmation of young male radicals. This unlikely coupling illuminates Baldwin's experience of Black Power's masculinist discourse through its striking insistence that gay male subjectivity is compatible with radical politics. The relationship between Christopher and Leo magically resolves the very contradictions that Baldwin experienced in his own relationship with Black Power advocates. Homosexuality is far from being inimical to Christopher's black nationalism; rather, it seems to be a sign of his political will. When Leo becomes anxious about "society's judgment" of their relationship, Christopher heartily proclaims, "Fuck these sick people. I do what I like. . . . Let's not sweat it baby. Love me. Let's just be nice" (339). Whereas Baldwin's homosexuality effeminized him and rendered him ineffectual in the eyes of young Black Power advocates, in this queer nationalist fantasy, homosexuality becomes a ballast for political belonging. Despite the gay couple's Utopian erasure of the opposition that Black Power advocates created between homosexuality and political radicalism, the narrative does not allow Leo to comfortably inhabit this union. Leo's efforts to gloss over his ideological differences with Christopher's nationalism by declaring his love and allegiance return like a repressed nightmare. Sitting with Christopher at a theater "where some nice things are happening" the disturbing incoherence of the pair's solidarity is revealed in Leo's response to the young people's aesthetics. Leo looks out upon a stage in which "hundreds and hundreds of girls and boys filled this space," and "some were lounging against the walls, some were sitting on the floor, some were embracing, some were dancing" (368). While certainly the scene represents Leo's difference in age from the young radicals, his catalogue of spatial and aesthetic dislocation speak to a more profound political disjuncture. And the dancers seemed in the nearly flickering violent light, with their beads flashing, their long hair flying, their robes whirling—or their tight skirts, tight pants signifying—and with the music assaulting them like the last, last trumpet, to be dancing in their grave clothes raised from the dead. On the wall were four screens and on these screens ectoplasmic faces and figures endlessly writhed . . . in a tremendous sexual rhythm which made me think of nameless creatures blindly coupling in all the slime of the world and at the bottom of the sea, and in the air we breathed and in one's own body. From time to time, on this screen, one recognized a face. I saw Yul Brynner's face for example, and for a moment I thought I saw my own. Christopher touched me on the shoulder. (369)

38 Chapter 1 One way to read this passage is as an indication of Leo's anxiety when faced with the confusing set of alliances between Black Power radicals such as Christopher and the counterculture politics of the New Left.77 But given that Christopher provides Leo's entree into this world, the disorienting aesthetic of the nightclub also reflects Leo's displaced anxiety about his support of nationalism. The young people in a sense perform a kind of nationalist collectivism, dancing and singing in a way that bleeds their identities into an ectoplasm of motion and sound. Yet Leo watches the scene as a mere observer, "witnessing, not sharing" (368). Unable to truly become one with the collective, he experiences their unity as a kind of death, an erasure of his existence as a discrete subject. In this regard, then, the narrative tracks the erotic allure of nationalist solidarity while also staging its erasure of individual autonomy. And in representing its anxieties about the disappearance of the autonomous subject the novel hearkens back to Baldwin's reservations about the NOI. The connection between death and national belonging becomes even more explicit as Christopher begins to advocate a more violent political agenda. Recovering from a recent heart attack, Leo nearly relapses when Christopher asks, "'if you don't want me to keep going under the feet of horses, then I think you got to agree that we need us some guns. Right?'" (370). Leo's coronary functions as an apt metaphor for his predicament since the older man's political investment is inseparable from his romantic and erotic cathexis. Ultimately, Leo's emotional attachment to Christopher becomes symptomatic of the former's largely affective relationship to black radicalism. While the novel clearly works to resist the invalidation of homosexuality in one sense, this work also frames the homoerotic attachment as the source of Leo's destruction. Put another way, Leo tends to allow his erotic bond with Christopher to forestall an analytical relationship to the black radicalism at hand. And it is this failure to mobilize a more rigorous critical consciousness that ultimately breaks Leo's heart. This text's complex treatment of black radicalism recommends substantial revision of conventional views regarding Baldwin's relationship to Black Power politics. While critics are correct in their claim that Baldwin was generally an advocate for the Black Power agenda in this period, they have not registered how the novel elucidates the potential failings of the very solidarity that he advocated in his essays. The novel reveals that, as late as 1968, Baldwin remained skeptical about the emancipatory promise of the patriarchal nationalism promoted by organizations such as the NOI. Moreover, as vexed as the novel is about its treatment of homosexuality, Baldwin does posit a vision of the gay male subject that militates against Black Power advocates' common assumption that homosexuality and radicalism were utterly incompatible. And the masculinist identification that was so pivotal to Baldwin's alliance with Black

My Father's Many Mansions 39 Power radicals is rewritten in this novel as a destructive loss of critical consciousness. My argument's focus on the mediating presence of masculinist and patriarchal ideologies in Baldwin's relationship with Black Power reveals an artist working to find viable political and aesthetic options as the calculus of black politics changed before his eyes. There is a degree of tragedy about Baldwin's failure to sustain the rigorous analysis of gender politics that fueled the polemic in so much of his early work. After all, what other black male writer has given such a powerful and complex portrait of gender asymmetry? How many male writers before the rise of feminism produced such a compelling cartography of the ways that masculinity potentially limited the freedom of black American men and women? Because of the shrewd analysis of gender and sexuality in his early work, the story of Baldwin's devolution to the crude patriarchal chauvinism of a novel like If Beale Street Could Talk is a thing to be lamented. Notwithstanding this air of tragedy, my rereading casts Baldwin as a more reflexive critical thinker than the scholarly record suggests. In Baldwin's more damning indictments of patriarchal social arrangements, as well as his later reservations about the homophobic preachments of revolutionary nationalists, he underscores the tenuousness and contingency that attended the reproduction of nationalist selfhood. In this way his work anticipates the very contradictions that dogged the formulations of nationalist paragons such as Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. Baldwin allows us to begin telling an alternative story about the evolution of nationalism, one in which the instantiation of a racial solidarity rooted in the masculine also produced its potential undoing.

Chapter 2

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood: Revolutionary Nationalism, John Edgar Wideman, and Remembrance

A signal impediment to reconsidering the divisions troubling the nationalist investment in masculinity is the persistent nostalgia shaping many recollections of Black Power activism. Whether in the widespread consumption of Malcolm X as a commodity in the 1980s or the revival of cultural trends such as the "Afro" and "soul music" in the new millennium, Americans have not yet shed their penchant for wistfully recalling the movement. Political scientist Adolph Reed offers a particularly suggestive theory for interpreting such nostalgia when he argues that the commodification of political icons from the 1960s is a direct consequence of waning black mobilization in the post-segregation era. According to Reed, the emergence of "Malcolmania"—his term for the explosion of T-shirts, baseball caps, and trinkets bearing representations of the slain leader— was fueled in part by a misguided longing to provide viable exemplars of leadership for black youth during a time of widespread demobilization. Such a therapeutic recourse effectively destroys "a sense of history as a process and reduces it to a field of static decontextualized parables."1 In essence, then, the declension of populist organizing since the 1970s has produced a hunger for authentic leadership that enables the recasting of Black Power as a commodity fetish; this transformation of history into currency hollows out the rich political and cultural dynamics that shaped the movement historically. Reed's theory provides an illuminating pathway into the work of John Edgar Wideman, a novelist who has also been preoccupied with how the crisis of contemporary demobilization relates to the activism of the past. In his essay "Dead Black Men and Other Fallout from the American Dream," Wideman guides readers through Los Angeles just after the 1992 Rodney King verdict and the ensuing unrest. For Wideman the most pertinent aspect of the uprising is that "after all the analysis, accounting, and assessment of property," of the dead, "nearly 80 percent are men of color."2 Faced with the disproportionate number of male casualties, it is understandable that he hopes these youth move toward more productive

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood

41

modes of insurgency. He wonders whether "the abiding result of the fire is a rebirth of Panther militant self assertion, its potential to be organized, conscious, purposeful."3 Given his affirmative musing about the resurgence of the Black Panthers' brand of activism and his sympathetic alignment with the organization, one might be tempted to view Wideman as a figure who has consistently supported the organization's radical agenda. But in truth his casting of the Black Panthers as an example of effective resistance announces an essential turnabout in his relationship to their politics. During the Black Power movement, Wideman's novel The Lynchers tracked the shortfalls of a revolutionary ideology that cannily paralleled that of the Black Panthers and other revolutionary nationalists. In a curious sense, then, the hunger for legitimate modes of political redress obscures a history characterized by contestation. The forgotten divide between Wideman's work and revolutionary nationalism also upsets established biographical accounts of the author. The two primary monographs on Wideman's fiction, James Coleman's Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman (1989) and Doreatha Mbalia's John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality (1995), frame the period from 1967 to 1973 as the first phase in his struggle to overcome cultural and political alienation from his fellow black Americans. They note appropriately that, as an Ivy League graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and one of the few tenured black professors at the University of Pennsylvania, Wideman was for a time quite removed from the political ferment of Black Power activism. His critics have therefore tended to cast his ascent from working class Pittsburgh to the ivory tower as an extension of a lamentable accession to European cultural tradition. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s, however, he felt pressured by his black students and the African American community at large to be a more active supporter of nationalist insurgency. His subsequent assumption of a chairmanship in the Afro-American studies department in 1970 and what he describes as "immersing myself for a number of years in as many different aspects of black culture as I could," all deepened his engagement with African American tradition and community.4 Within this narrative of homecoming, The Lynchers has typically been read as a minor watershed, his first narrative, in Coleman's words, to give "an important place in its structure to black historical tradition, speech, and cultural tradition."5 Within this framework Wideman's third novel serves as a bridge between the high modernist abstruseness of his first two novels and the black vernacular experimentation that animates his Homewood trilogy of the 1980s. Despite the persuasiveness of these accounts, they neglect the novel's deep skepticism about the emancipatory agenda that organizations like the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the Black Panthers offered as remedies for communal grievance.

42 Chapter 2 Therefore, what warrants further consideration is this work's vexed ideological ties to revolutionary nationalism. At issue were the new strategies for encoding the history of black oppression and the dream of a communal liberation. Revolutionary nationalists asked the African American public to understand its political reality through ideologies in which the masculine body and mind represented the race's political status. Through their representations of black men afflicted by oppression and triumphantly reconstituted in liberation, they made the effects of black subordination intelligible to the African American public, rationalized the mandate for communal violence, and shored up their own institutional authority as leaders of a radical vanguard. Many of the premises that propelled this strain of nationalism evolved through engagement with the theories of radical figures such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung. The "translation" of this international radicalism at once inspired new ways of processing the subjection of black Americans and produced troublesome discord on the American political scene. Or posed another way, could the revolutionary subject of Fanonian discourse, with his focus on embodied resistance and his capacity to remake the consciousness of the nation, be readily transposed into the United States? And presuming that he survived the transfer, how would this new subject be read by his fellow radicals and the public he was to refashion? The Lynchers is a text preoccupied with the radical masculine subject that was recast in the American grain. It foregrounds both the Utopian promise of that subjectivity and its radical incongruity with the material and political reality of the United States. Furthermore, the story of Wideman's dissent opens a window into unexamined dimensions of revolutionary nationalism itself. His narrative's skeptical response to this radical ideology elaborates trepidation manifest in the formulations of the most aggressively masculinist advocates. The writings of Huey P. Newton as well as the literary works of Robert Wesley and Etheridge Knight expressed telling ambivalence about the tendency to politicize masculinity. They were espe-cially concerned that the focus on identity would hamper more substantial challenges to state authority. But even in articulating their reservations, they never fully ceded their investment in masculinity's liberating potential. A reconsideration of these tensions makes it possible to see how the vagaries generated by masculinist ideologies were constitutive of the revolutionary nationalist agenda. The fact that the critical purchase offered by Wideman's fiction has gone unremarked up to now is in some measure a function of the sweeping changes that have affected the author and the nation. Certainly, Wideman's personal impulse to resurrect the organized militancy of the Black Panthers gestures toward the remarkable demobilization of black insurgency

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood 43 that Reed construes as the hallmark of the postsegregation era. And at the same time, Wideman's retrospective realignment with the black Left has also been underwritten, paradoxically, by a veneration of masculinity as a source of political redemption—a strategy that became dominant in American politics during the 1980s. Locating Wideman within these sea changes entails both a return to the transnational flows that made it possible for a black nation to imagine itself as Fanonian "new men" and a reconstruction of a lost yet vital dissent. Inventing the Revolutionary Male Body The gendered revolutionary nationalism that animates Wideman's work intersected with an internationalist turn within the black American Left on the one hand and more local endeavors to challenge state power on the other. Inspired by Marxism, as well as the anticolonial movements in Africa, Cuba, and Vietnam, nationalists drew correlations between the racial subordination of black Americans and oppressed people around the globe. For instance, expressing solidarity with the North Vietnamese, an anonymous article in the Black Panther newspaper pronounced, "[W]e understand that our struggle for our liberation is part of a worldwide struggle being waged by the poor and oppressed against the world's chief imperialist the U.S."6 Along similar lines, Max Stanford, the chief theoretician of RAM, posited that Western hegemony would be atomized by simultaneous revolts in the United States and abroad. He predicted that at home the "CIA, FBI, National Guard or local police will be unable to control our people due to their internal conflicts," and globally, "Foreign imperialists' holdings will be seized by the various revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America."7 Brimming with confidence about the imminent demise of "the Beast (Western Imperialism)," Stanford and his comrades dreamed the violent "birth of a New World."8 No doubt the retrenchment of Western capital in subsequent decades and the global fracturing of the Left ultimately exposed the incaution of such pronouncements. But even more significantly, the emergence of this international focus within the movement underscores the problem of translation that these advocates created for themselves. By importing the ideology of anticolonial and Marxist revolt onto the American scene, activists frequently found themselves suffering the contradictions of their own cosmopolitan vision. One viable point of departure in writing this genealogy is Robert Williams's adaptation of Cuban revolutionary ideology— a seminal project that would go on to trouble the Black Panther Party and others who followed in his path. As early as 1964, Williams argued that only an "urban guerilla war" would effectively dismantle America's racial hierarchies.9 Williams's radicalism took this form shortly after he

44 Chapter 2 was ousted from his position as a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch president. His removal stemmed from his insistence that the violence of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan had to be met with equal force. Under threat from white supremacists and federal authorities alike, he fled his home in Monroe, North Carolina, and took exile in Cuba. Profoundly influenced by the communist revolution that he witnessed on the island, he evolved from advocating armed self-defense as a strategy to arguing that strategic acts of violence such as "derailing of trains," "molotov cocktails," and "gasoline fire bombs" could be employed to eliminate "the source of evil and terror."10 He stopped short of demanding the overthrow of the U.S. government as such, but his oxymoronic call for a "guerilla war of self-defense" only further underscores his uneven appropriation of Cuba's revolutionary strategies. He and other nationalists clung to the rhetorical stance of the revolutionary without fully committing to violence as a primary way to usher in the emancipation of the black public. Most notably, in the late 1960s the Black Panthers advocated an agenda of guerilla warfare, but as they came under increasing pressure from local and federal authorities adopted a more gradualist stance with respect to the revolutionary process.11 Consequently, the early 1970s was a period in which the core leadership of the Oakland Panthers struggled to reign in those members who remained committed to the earlier agenda of emancipation through violence.12 Despite this unevenness, the civil unrest that wracked American cities in the late sixties gave a well-founded persuasive force to Williams's advocacy of strategic violence. Answering his call, organizations like the Black Panthers and RAM framed themselves as leaders of a radical vanguard— one that claimed to embody the martial strategies to be adopted by the black public. Some nationalists even began to implement their "guerilla" tactics.13 In a particularly sensational case, four male members of RAM were arrested in 1967 when a police informant discovered the group's plan to "create a riot in the city of Philadelphia . . . to commit murder, to cause public chaos, and literally to destroy the city by violence."14 According to officials, RAM members planned to spark a race war by poisoning police water supplies and assassinating state officials.15 Similarly, an autobiography from former Black Panther David Hilliard recounts a fire fight between Oakland police and a group of renegade Black Panthers under the leadership of Eldridge Cleaver. According to Hilliard, the incident stemmed from the dissident group's labor to spark a race war by strategically attacking the police.16 In the arc from Williams's grafting of Cuban martial tactics onto the U.S. context to the conspiratorial attacks on police, the rough translations of international radicalism reconfigured black American ideology and practice.

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood 45 Within these transnational exchanges, masculinity at once provided a lingua franca among black leftists and contributed to the ongoing problems of ideological trade across geographical, political, and cultural boundaries. The complexities of the global focus on gender are all too apparent in the adoption by the Black Panther Party of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963). To wit, George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver straightforwardly acknowledged the transformative effects that the Antillean psychiatrist's writings had on their own political theories.17 Cleaver even went so far as to term The Wretched of the Earth the "Bible" of the black radical.18 They were especially drawn to Fanon's framing of colonialism as an acute crisis in the subject formation of colonized black men. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon makes his well-known argument that in the West a way of seeing has evolved in which the Negro is perpetually misrecognized and equated with degraded carnality: "biology, penis, strong, athletic, savage, animal," and so forth.19 The specter of the black male rapist and the legendary proportions ascribed to his member all arise from the premise that "the Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions" (177). Or put more bluntly, "the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a Penis. He is a Penis" (170). Not unlike the often cited scene of instruction in which Fanon's own racial identity is foisted upon him by the whites who hail him as "Dirty Nigger," the signs that interpellate the Negro as narrowly embodied also ironically enunciate a form of "nonbeing," a subjectivity that "burst apart" under the gaze that objectifies (109). To be black and male in this schema, therefore, is to have one's being atomized through an overly restrictive designation. In his two definitive works Fanon proposes quite disparate solutions to this fractured subjectivity. In Black Skin, White Masks he submits, "In order to terminate this neurotic situation . . . I have only one solution. To rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal" (197). Not unlike Baldwin, Fanon imagines himself transcending the binaries that characterize racial identities in the West through both his analytical dissection of these discourses and his repudiation of their dehumanizing effects. His positing of "one human being" further suggests that through analysis he achieves an ontological coherence denied him by the alienating discourses of race. This more humanist solution to the problem of racial subjection stands in stark contrast to the antidote proposed in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the African man's violent embodied resistance against imperial authority replaces the more analytical solution posed in his earlier work. Violence thus becomes a ritual gesture in forging the cohesive identities of "new men and with it a new language, a new humanity."20 He goes on

46 Chapter 2

to assert that "[v]iolence will be claimed by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture . . . which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people. . . . The destruction of the colonial world is nothing more [than] the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country" (40-41). The display of masculine bodies confronting colonial powers then transforms the identities of not only the men who perform in the display but also the colonized population as a whole. Violence in this sense is both instrumental and a semiotic code embodied by male rebels. The actions of the insurgent body signify to the colonized public, hailing them as new subjects through articulate actions. Especially germane here is how the emphasis on the expressive content of the body in action militates against the colonial economy in which the body is merely a site for the colonial power's inscriptions. The legacy of extralegal violence that black Americans faced made black nationalists particularly receptive to a theory that placed such emphasis on reclaiming the body. Be it H. Rap Brown's declaration that "the honky cop kills black people because they are black" or the Black Panther Party newspaper's serial documentation of the routine brutality carried out by the Oakland police, the narratives of these activists are replete with their justifiable grievances about historical and ongoing brutality enacted on black citizens.21 In fact, the Black Panther Party emerged in 1966 as Huey P. Newton and Bobby Scale worked to counter persistent police brutality. The organization's short-lived armed surveillance of police officers and the rallies led by armed Panthers should be seen as part of their strategic challenges to a law enforcement regime that routinely employed force as a way to maintain the hierarchies of a white supremacist order. The intractable nature of police brutality also grounded their argument that local police were analogous to Fanon's colonial "agents of government" who "speak the language of pure force," a lexicon that they argued was only effectively challenged through force.22 In a historical sense, then, nationalist recalcitrance in the face of state violence effectively countered a U.S. tradition that rationalized disciplinary violence against black men. The work of Trudier Harris, Robyn Wiegman, and Sandra Gunning has ably demonstrated how Americans rationalized violence against the black male body as a way of constituting the authority of a masculinist white nationalism.23 The black nationalist focus on embodiment can be seen in some measure, then, as a labor to wrench masculine corporeality away from its historical place within white nationalist discourse and reframe that corpus as a site for imagining black liberation. In a characteristic moment, Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood 47

established his own rationale for strategic attacks on repressive state authorities: "When the Vanguard group destroys the machinery of the oppressor by dealing with him in small groups of three or four, and then escapes the might of the oppressor, the masses will be overjoyed, and will adhere to this correct strategy. When the masses hear that a gestapo policeman has been executed while sipping coffee at a counter, and the revolutionary executioners fled without being traced, the masses will see the value of this type of approach to resistance.... [I] t is important for the party to show the people how to go about revolution."24 Citing The Wretched of the Earth as a touchtone for his argument, Newton imagines that ritual violence inculcates the discipline of revolt in the black populace. His association of the Panthers with the "Messiah" whom the people seek "to liberate them from the hands of the oppressor" underscores both his mystification of the Panthers' leadership status as well as his understanding of these strikes as a uniquely masculine form of redemption (44). In a similar vein, George Jackson, the Black Panther who as a prisoner sought to radicalize his fellow inmates, legitimated his status as a radical by referencing Fanon's argument that revolutionary fighters are "the essence of the fight which explodes the old colonial truths. "25 Imagining a revolution that evolves in stages he claims, In the early service of the people there must be totally committed, professional revolutionaries who understand that all human life is meaningless if it is not accompanied by the controls that determine its quality. I am one of these. My life has absolutely no value. I'm the man under hatches, the desperate one. We will make the revolution... . We will meet terror with counter-terror.... [T]he lynch murder of a friend—it makes me angry, not afraid. I'm the next man that must be lynched! My forefather trembled when his brother was lynched, but my brother's immolation means war to the death, war to the knife.26

Setting himself apart from a male ancestry that was cowed by violence, Jackson inscribes a masculine self in which the fearless and willful risk of bodily harm publicly announces the radical nature of one's political consciousness. In this way the will to sacrifice the body produces the revolutionary subjectivity of the colonized. Jackson's observation that the black male body at risk enunciated the new radicalism was emphatically reinforced by fellow Black Panthers. Newton's 1973 autobiography Revolutionary Suicide begins with his tracing of the necessarily sacrificial nature of revolutionary identity. He cites his own resistance against state authority while serving a prison term as an example of how his bodily risk exemplified "revolutionary suicide," a form of self-sacrifice that would in turn instruct the masses in radical rebellion. Refusing to cooperate with prison authorities, he was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement where he disciplined his body and mind to withstand the isolation and sensory deprivation. In so doing he

48 Chapter 2

"rejected all they stood for. Even though my struggle might have harmed my health, even killed me, I looked upon it as a way of raising the consciousness of other inmates, as a contribution to the ongoing revolution."27 Newton represents corporal sacrifice as no mere inspiration, but as a bodily action that interpellates others. The focus on corporal sacrifice also sutured the Panthers' revolutionary theory to that of less well-known radical organizations such as RAM. Committed disciples of Robert Williams, RAM was founded by Max Stanford to fulfill the former's call for disciplined revolutionary violence. Quoting Black Panther H. Rap Brown, Stanford argues that "it's time to stop lootin' and start shootin."28 In addition to such pithy statements, Stanford went on to outline his theories of revolutionary violence more systematically in an unpublished book manuscript, The Ideology of Black Revolution (1970). Here he crafted a model of identity that turns on corporal resistance against white male authority. Stanford submits that until "brothers are willing to sacrifice and give their lives for the liberation of their women, children, and themselves, they cannot call themselves men. This means that they are willing and prepared to physically confront the enemy."29 An essential task of revolutionary theory, according to Stanford, was therefore to "set standards and values for manhood" that would in turn goad black youth into sacrificing their bodies on behalf of the emergent nation.30 Although revolutionary nationalists built upon Fanonian embodiment in their fashioning of black radical identities, they also articulated an aggressive focus on feminine subordination that reflected their American accent. Few wedded masculine privilege to the movement's overall political mandate as systematically as Eldridge Cleaver. While serving a prison term for a rape conviction, Cleaver penned his Soul on Ice, a collection of essays and letters amply distributed to Panther members. In one of this text's core documents, a letter titled "To All Black Women from All Black Men," Cleaver details the logic whereby the Panthers conflated the violence enacted on male bodies historically with a communal legacy of oppression. Addressing an imaginary female reader he claims, "Across the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my balls, we face each other today, my Queen. I feel a deep terrifying hurt, the pain and humiliation of the vanquished warrior. The shame of the fleet footed sprinter who stumbles at the start of the race. . . . I want you to know that I feared to look into your eyes because I knew I would find reflected there a merciless indictment of my impotence and a compelling challenge to redeem my conquered manhood."31 Through allusions to lynching, Cleaver encodes four hundred years of racial subjection. When he evokes the word "manhood," he does so within a network of ideological significance that positions "embodiment," "communal

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oppression," and "masculinity" as equivalent terms. Cleaver further elaborates his theory by displacing masculine reinvention onto the black woman. The passage refigures the restoration of black manhood as being undertaken on behalf of black women at the same time that women's emasculation of men ironically provides the warrant for reasserting the primacy of masculine authority. Even as Cleaver was influenced by Fanon's internationalist theories, his symbolic representation of racial subjection was embedded in the material and historical realities of American gender politics. Certainly the work of feminists such as Diana Fuss and Vicky Lebeau convincingly argues that Fanon too presumed that the subject of his revolutionary theories was masculine; but the sleight of hand whereby Cleaver aggressively mandated female subordination in the name of masculine redemption was the particular inflection of American radicalism. Dismantling the Revolutionary Body The combination of violence, embodiment, and redemptive politics that energized the writings of revolutionary nationalists forms the ideological scaffolding of Wideman's novel The Lynchers. The text recounts the experiences of four conspirators in the late 1960s attempting to catalyze a revolt by Philadelphia's black underclass through the public lynching of a white police officer. Because of internal contradictions within their revolutionary philosophy, internal dissension among the conspirators, and straightforward state repression, the lynching never takes place. The charismatic leader, Willie "Littleman" Hall, is murdered by police and dies still proselytizing on behalf of the lynching. A reluctant conspirator, Thomas Wilkerson is murdered by his comrade Graham Rice when the former attempts to stop the lynching from taking place. Rice himself goes mad because of his peculiar personal investment in the form of self-fashioning that the ideology of the lynching inspires. A fourth conspirator named Saunders is left abandoned to stew in frustrated rancor. Their tangled overlays of personal desire and political dissolution constitute one of the era's most detailed and intellectually supple accounts of what made revolutionary nationalism both enticing and deeply flawed. A critical synergy between Wideman's fictional universe and the history of revolutionary nationalism is the scripting of black national politics through renderings of the masculine body. Willie "Littleman" Hall, the messianic leader of the conspirators, imagines the history of southern lynching as a public consolidation of white power via the destruction of black male bodies. As he puts it, "when rastus burns there is a communal hard-on. Whites right, standing tall. Pine tree straight, snow clean, gleaming big and power swollen like an Empire State building. Right here in little old Talladega."32 Willie's conception of power cannot be separated

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from the integrity of the male subject's body. The white community is figured as an erect phallus that maintains its integrity because a black male body is being destroyed. In this regard, his first exposition on the meaning of lynching slips between images of bodily integrity and communal political power as though the distinctions between the two do not exist. Modifying the Fanonian argument that the black man constitutes a phallic body in Western representations, Willie writes lynching as a ritual murder that enables the white public's reclamation of the phallic authority that the black victim incarnates. His dissection of power here is oddly resonant with Robyn Wiegman's claim that the castration of the lynch victim "is figured in its relation to the power and privilege of white masculinity, becoming in its dismemberment bearer of the white phallus's meaning."33 Working at cross-purposes, of course—Wiegman to dismantle white supremacy and Willie to lay claim to its structures of authority— they nonetheless share a theoretical language for dissecting the logics of American nationalism. The conspirators' plan to publicly lynch a corrupt police officer also operates through a structure that is fundamentally centered on the synecdochic associations between the body and political authority. Through the destruction of a white male body, the Lynchers hope to refashion their identities. "When we lynch the cop we declare our understanding of the past, our scorn for it, our disregard for any consequences that the past has taught us to fear. We also deny any future except one conditioned by new definitions of ourselves as fighters, free, violent men who will determine the nature of the reality in which they exist. . . . There won't be a South or a South street for these new men" (117). If the white police officer represents a history of white domination and hegemony, then through the destruction of that body that legacy is inverted, remaking the Lynchers as men. Willie "Littleman" Hall, like his historical counterparts on the national scene and abroad, forges an ideology about revolution in which the reinvention of black male identity is construed as an essential end of revolutionary action. And the novel is no less aware that this revolutionary plan is intimately tied to a Fanonian economy of violence. Willie makes this connection quite explicit when he tells Wilkerson that revolution "obviously means violence. Supreme violence. Nobody gives up power without a fight. . . . You have to turn things upside down. Topsy Turvy. You've read Fanon. He says it well" (236). Thus Willie establishes the legitimacy of his plan through a citation that ties national and international revolt. Given Willie's association of corporal integrity with power, his rhetoric logically centers on regaining corporal wholeness. At the same time, the novel's depiction of the Lynchers' leader and chief theoretician upsets the very notion of remaking the black male body. Willie, a man with dwarfed

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood 51 and partially handicapped legs, embodies the inadequacies of an emancipatory ideology rooted in reimagining the masculine body. Willie's flesh is both the limit case of this ideological fantasy and the site of a certain pathos for its destructive consequences. Frustrated by his lack of authority and the failings of his own corporeality, Willie frequently crafts elaborate fantasies in which he is re-created as an integral whole. Even winning a simple arm wrestling match becomes a springboard for his fantasies about bodily wholeness. "Slowly at first a tall tree in the wind, then strengthless but still erect, Max Schmelling after the Brown bomber delivered, a wall slammed broadside by the black demolition ball, all stays gone, brief pitiful totter, maybe you won't die after all, then down, down for good . . . Littleman still panting as if the rhythm and strength would not leave him, as if victory were only partial, as if the hand embraced so tightly by his iron must be driven to the floor driven to some subterranean rendezvous with Down' (56-57). As his reference to the boxing exploits of Joe Louis suggests, Willie imagines that this arm wrestling competition has everything to do with the power achieved through bodily wholeness and self-mastery. In Willie's imagination his crippled body is completely refashioned as it becomes perfectly synchronized with his will. While reveling in his victory for a brief moment he is "miraculously made whole, a normal man" (56). This ritual play might be understood as a performance of symbolic violence that Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth frames as a transitional ritual performed en route to more material violence. For "the native's relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away" (58). Yet while the Fanonian impulse is to frame such rituals as an organic part of the revolutionary process, the novel foregrounds the imaginary, contingent nature of Willie's desire. Juxtaposed against Willie's internal monologue about the arm wrestling match is the narrator's observation that "Littleman was a grotesque puppet leaned against the wall, half a man bent in the middle with doll legs in front of him that would never move unless someone tugged the strings" (58). In an evocative passage of dialogism, Wideman's narrative acknowledges the power of Willie's ritual even as it short-circuits what Fanon construed as its inevitable relationship to more material violence.34 Put another way, the novel reproduces a narrative pattern wherein Willie links revolutionary politics, his own body, and manhood, only to have those connections dissolved by the narrator's corrosive commentary. As leader of the conspiracy, Willie instills the ideology of the lynching in his coconspirators through his lengthy diatribes. These monologues continue, "rambling on till the outrageous and plausible were linked in his metaphors" (62). In one of the Lynchers' meetings the relationship between this constant ideological reification and the body are exploded. While the

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conspirators remain enveloped in Willie's mesmeric oratory, the narrative troubles Willie's corporeal transformation: 'Words still flung at them like spit driven backward by the wind. The man seemed to be rising from the earth. The proportions of his torso could not be carried by the incongruous legs. Like a geyser of muscle and bone he was emerging, the pieces of a god returning after he had been torn apart and sowed in the water during a rite of fall. But the water had diminished the legs, frogs legs tucked into the trunk of a bear. The magicians had not understood the spell. . . . And now, prematurely risen, grotesquely risen, lured from his deep rest . . . the god curses the forces which cripple him" (231). Willie's desire to craft a revolutionary ideology through the fantastic remaking of his own body fails woefully, his new body becoming a grotesque parody of his own desire. Instead of remaking his body, he emerges from this instance of self-fashioning more deformed and debilitated. By emphasizing the inability of their collective fantasy to fully reconstruct Willie's body, the novel ruptures Willie's ideological claim that "the deed did have some magical relationship to the word" (60). This narrative proves equally keen in the way that it highlights the relationship between Willie's investment in remaking his body and the subordination of black women. Willie's failed romance with Angela Taylor offers a case in point. From the beginning of their affair Willie views Angela as a conduit in the reconstruction of his body. When he first meets her on a beach, he fantasizes about displaying his genitalia to her in order to reaffirm his corporal integrity. Willie "wished he had pulled it out. Shown her from a distance the healthy ramrod of his manhood . . . functioning as well as that of any seven foot basketball player" (125). His desire to capture Angela with a display of phallic masculinity also reflects his more profound need to dominate her. Imagining that the phallus compensates for his handicapped body, he wishes that he could "leap out and strike her with the leaded cane. Pin her body to the sand. A man taking what he wanted" (124). Sexual desire, like the revolutionary plan itself, reflects Willie's private longing to rehabilitate his body and his masculinity. As Willie's relationship to Angela evolves into an actual sexual relationship, he continues to view their physical intimacy as a ritual for his self-making. During their lovemaking he appropriates her body to refashion his own by "stealing the symmetry of her long straight legs to remould the absurd foreshortening of his own" (131). The novel clearly highlights the ways in which the foregrounding of the masculine self erases her as an autonomous subject. Once Angela finally decides to end her affair with Willie, she argues that her own preservation figures centrally in her decision: "I was frightened because I saw that the best thing in you was relentless, demanding. In many ways it is a sick, evil thing, but it is the best of you. I could not come back to you and wait for it to expose me,

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for it to grind me to bits. I am more afraid of dying than anything else, and the best thing in you is death" (171). It is no accident that, as Angela explains why she is leaving, she points out that Willie does not fully know her name. That is, she fully recognizes that Willie needs her to exist as a kind of lack or absence, and it is this nonbeing that she militates against. In allowing Angela to challenge Willie's marginalization of her, the novel takes issue with the inclination to subordinate women that was a hallmark of black revolutionary nationalism. By exposing this logic, Wideman's novel aligns itself with feminists such as Angela Davis and Michelle Wallace in ways that have not been recognized. It would be overreaching to term this work feminist as such. Nonetheless, in putting pressure on the uneven translation of the revolutionary body into the American scene, the novel puts forward a representation of persistent gender inequity that substantively complements the critiques that feminists have made.

Nationalism and the Giving of Manhood In its delineation of a failed revolutionary plot, Wideman's narrative fingers contradictions and anxieties that also erupted in the writings of the very revolutionary nationalists who constructed this masculinist agenda. These tensions come to the surface unconsciously in a lengthy analysis that Newton wrote to extol the revolutionary virtues of Melvin Van Peebles's film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The film follows the development of its hero, Sweetback, from his boyhood spent in a house of prostitution to his alliance with a group of black radicals. In crafting an argument to establish the narrative's militant authenticity, Newton fixates on the bodily development of Sweetback. Describing a scene in which the hero loses his virginity, he casts this physical act as a revolutionary transformation: "[T]his is not a sexual scene, this is a very sacred rite. For the Boy who was nourished into health, is now being baptized into manhood; and the act of love, the giving of manhood is also bestowing on the boy the characteristics which will deliver him from very difficult situations."35 Reproducing the formulations of Cleaver, the manhood of the individual represents something more than Sweetback's individual rite of passage. Sweetback's carnal development stands as synecdoche for black America's evolving political consciousness. In Newton's terms, "within the heart of the community, just as in the film the sacred rite of feeding and nourishing the youth [Sweetback] goes on; they are brought to their manhood as liberators."36 The analysis thus naturalizes the link between the boy's carnal development and a collective politics of liberation. Though Newton claims to understand his use of the male subject in symbolic terms, his language betrays the assertion. In the conclusion of

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his analysis, he blurs distinctions between manhood as a sign and manhood as a politically meaningful concept in its own right: "Sweetback has a high level of consciousness; that is to say, he is Sweet Sweetback because he has come to understand that freedom, liberation, and the ability to love require that first of all you have to recapture the holy grail; you have to restore your dignity and manhood by destroying the one who took it from you."37 Initially, masculinity exists as sign of black America's growing political awareness, yet in this instance it literally is the most significant object of activism. The elaborate maneuver to frame masculine selffashioning as the primary end of radical politics also draws attention to his evasion of an unsettling inference; the nationalist veneration of the masculine could very well produce a politics that is little else but a form of self-creation. That is, Newton's need to ascribe revolutionary content to what is in fact a form of self-fashioning exposes his underlying anxiety that his preoccupation with masculinity is nothing but the making of an identity. The fault line that Newton enunciates and conceals also indicates nationalists' broader internal division with respect to masculinity. By 1973 he began to distance himself from the rhetoric that called for a reaffirmation of black manhood. This turnabout occurred at a time when the Black Panther Party, after being depleted by persistent arrests and state violence, was, as he writes, "in a shambles."38 In an effort to recapture the party's legitimacy, Newton took Cleaver to task for exacerbating the problem. "I see now that Eldridge was not dedicated to helping Black people but was in search of a strong manhood symbol. This was a common misconception at the time—that the Party was searching for badges of masculinity. In fact the reverse was true. The party acted as it did because we were men. Many failed to perceive the difference. As for Eldridge, at that stage in his life he was probing for his manhood."39 Newton chastises those Black Panthers who joined the organization merely to reaffirm their masculine egos, yet he challenges his comrades by asserting that authentic Panther members possessed an intact manhood before joining the organization. He undercuts his criticism of fellow members by again asserting the primacy of masculinity; the glaring illogic in Newton's work certainly highlights the tensions underlying his deployment of masculinist discourse. One of the most aggressive advocates of male privilege felt pressured to temper his masculinist rhetoric, and the result is a gender politics in which internal contradictions threaten to render his platform incoherent. Newton's anxieties had parallels in the literary world as well. Symptomatic of this current is the treatment of male body politics in Richard Wesley's 1970 play Black Terror: A Revolutionary Adventure Story. Written for the New Lafayette Theatre, an important arm of the nationalist cultural scene, the play affirms the call for "guerilla warfare." Nonetheless,

The Clumsy Trap of Manhood 55 the drama also works to reign in the movement's rush toward "revolutionary suicide, urban kamikaze, rather than concrete political theories."40 Wesley's criticism isolated a segment of revolutionary nationalism that viewed the sacrifice of the masculine body in urban warfare as the definitive expression of radicalism. He recast the orthodoxy of corporal daring put forward by Newton, Jackson, and Cleaver as "not beneficial at all to Black people."41 In countering the established paradigm of radical identity, Black Terror showed audiences on the one hand a fictive organization that was doomed by its commitment to a sacrificial warfare, and on the other the more strategic guerilla tactics of a character named Keusi Kifo. Keusi emphasizes caution, survival, and logical planning as a remedy for a revolutionary ideal that sponsors a "value system directed toward death."42 In this sense the play took issue with the pervasive model of masculine sacrifice crafted by elites such as Jackson and Newton. Despite the piece's countermove, its affirmative project remains firmly grounded in legitimating masculine authority. That is, the play's call for a more theoretically informed guerilla warfare intersects with an anxiety about revolutionary nationalism's erasure of gender distinction. For instance, Keusi's love interest in the play, Mbalia, commits herself to revolutionary violence, but in her zeal to support the cause she forgets how to "do everything a man expects of a woman." From Keusi's vantage point a woman's place in the revolution is to "get fucked and have babies" (253). He subsequently affirms his patriarchal privilege by slapping her as a reminder that "[y]ou're a woman before anything else. When I get through with you, you'll never want to forget that" (254). While the play takes exception to the sacrificial model of masculinity that was pervasive in the movement, it does so in service of an agenda that demands women's subordination. From one vantage point, Wesley's play contains an oppositional politics that is indicative of the internal contradictions of revolutionary nationalism more generally. Groups such as the Black Panthers and RAM often echoed Max Stanford's pronouncement that "[i]n order for revolutions to be effective they must revolutionize the .. . family traditions of the old society" and bring "more social equality to women in the new society."43 Stanford makes this assertion, only to claim soon after that the black woman must "see the blackman as a black shining prince and must be able to submit to his will and direction."44 Thus the radical egalitarianism that nationalists themselves construed as necessary to the success of revolutionary politics was frequently undone by their simultaneous need to reassert their masculine authority. The poet Etheridge Knight was one of the rare figures within the Black Arts pantheon who confronted the limits of nationalist body politics more robustly. His often anthologized poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane" echoes Wesley's concern that the

56 Chapter 2 sacrifice of masculine bodies would produce a radical transformation of the black public. In some sense Hard Rock, the mythically insurgent prisoner who fellow inmates claim "once bit / A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit," serves as a less explicitly politicized instantiation of radical sacrifice.45 While the poem does not offer a programmatic account of Hard Rock's political intentions, clearly his resistance against the discipline of prison officials functions as a model of resistance for his fellow inmates who "dreamed of doing" what Hard Rock achieves. The poem nonetheless denaturalizes the prisoner's investment in his embodied resistance. For it is Hard Rock's very status as a body that represents their collective desire for insurgency that actually demobilizes the prisoners. Once prison officials lobotomize Hard Rock, the dream of collective resistance that his feats of resistance embody dissolves and leaves them "[c] rushed" with "[t]he fear of years, like a biting whip," cutting "grooves too deeply across our backs." One conclusion that might be drawn from these closing lines is that the investment in the male body at risk provides a fragile ballast against the material realities of state authority. In this regard, Knight's poem works as a cautionary tale about the limits of the articulate male body as strategy for galvanizing a radical black public. Yet even if one accepts this reading as viable, the poem's lingering romance with the body cannot be ignored entirely; the very aura of tragedy and pathos in the piece stem from the lack produced once the body that speaks the consciousness of the people has been rendered inert. Straddling a line between nostalgia for the articulate body and recognition of its inevitable shortfalls, the poem was a rare instance in which a movement artist joined Wideman in foregrounding the anxieties attending the nationalist recourse to corporeality.

"A Mind of Our Own": The Black Panthers and Masculinist Political Consciousness While one strand of revolutionary nationalism produced the history of black oppression as the synecdochic black male body, another strand figured that legacy in terms of the decimation of the black male "mind." The focus on refashioning male political consciousness was especially relevant to the Black Panthers in their efforts to legitimate their own vanguard status. In doing so they created a political ideology in which it became increasingly difficult to articulate the object of emancipatory politics. Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice is indicative of a logic whereby the Black Panthers equated the refashioning of male consciousness with political radicalism. Cleaver writes a mythical narrative that attempts to account for the origins of black oppression. He argues that historically the white male subject usurped "the controlling Administrative Function of the society

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as a whole" and thus is associated with the mind (165). Certainly, the mind here signifies higher cognitive processes in general, but more importantly, Cleaver links cognition to hegemonic authority and power. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the black male subject "has been robbed of his mind" and, as a consequence, suffers from a condition of Fanonian hyperembodiment (216). This body, while signifying "strength" and "virility" fundamentally lacks the ability to "run, regulate or control anything" (210, 216). Cleaver further imagines that the theft of the mind signifies that the black male subject "has been deprived of his manhood" (218). Just as the debilitated body serves as a synecdoche for a subjugated black collective, so the loss of the male mind stands in for black America's historical lack of hegemonic authority. Because Cleaver understands the construction of the male consciousness as a primary index of collective political autonomy, it is understandable that he imagines the Utopian empowerment of black citizens as the recuperation of the mind. For instance, as he describes the waves of black urban riots during the sixties, it is the reclamation of the mind (and by extension, manhood) that the events represent: "It was too late because it was time for the blacks ('I've got a mind of my own!') to riot, to sweep through the Harlem night like a wave of locusts, breaking screaming, bleeding laughing, crying, rejoicing, in a jubilee of destruction, to regurgitate the white man's bullshit they'd been eating for four hundred years" (232). Black Americans' collective rejection of "four hundred years" of white male domination is represented as a male subject's reclamation of his mind. The individual who proclaims, "I've got a mind" becomes the operative code for black America's overthrow of white hegemony. Cleaver's focus on masculine consciousness was only confirmed in Newton's own argument that the black male was especially traumatized psychologically as a consequence of ongoing oppression. As he phrases it in his essay "Fear and Doubt," the "lower socio-economic black male is a man of confusion" who "feels that he is something less than a man."46 Suffering from sundry forms of emasculation, Newton's subject is "ineffectual in and out of the home. He cannot provide for, or protect his family. He is invisible, a nonentity. He is a consumer and not a producer. He is dependent on the White man (THE MAN') to feed his family, to give him a job, educate his children, serve as the model that he tries to emulate. He is dependent and he hates THE MAN' and he hates himself."47 Newton's subject suffers from a negation of masculine selfhood that derives from multiple forms of economic and social deprivation. However, this formulation works to articulate what happens to black male subjectivity under certain conditions of oppression rather than examining the instruments of power and privilege that make the erasure of the subject possible. As a consequence, Newton's representation of masculine selfhood

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takes precedence over the system that made the subject's state of being possible. Placing the redemption of masculine consciousness at the forefront of his activism only further confounded his articulation of his political ends. This unsettling relationship to the object of politics persists elsewhere in Newton's writings. When he characterizes the Panthers' response to potential alliances with white radicals, he evokes Cleaver's discourse on the mind to define the Black Panthers' revolutionary character. Arguing the need for black self-determination, he claims, "[W]e have as Eldridge Cleaver says in SOUL ON ICE a mind of our own. We've regained our mind that was taken away from us and we will decide the political as well as the practical stand that we'll take. We'll make the theory and carry out the practice."48 The Black Panthers' ability to conceive and realize their own political theory serves as evidence that they have reclaimed the mind of the imaginary black subject. Not referencing any history of communal subjugation, Newton takes for granted that regaining the mind has a manifestly insurgent political meaning. What is initially a representation of the referent (communal subjugation) thus becomes a self-evident, selfjustifying characteristic of the Panthers themselves. Therefore the slippage between representation and referent in this instance figures crucially in the way that the party founder mystifies and legitimates their vanguard status.49 This seamless movement between masculine political consciousness as a representation of social reality and as a manifestly radical political objective in its own right becomes even more pronounced in Newton's formulation of what constitutes a revolutionary act. Validating the Panthers' status as a "vanguard" party he claims that "the Black Panther Party along with all revolutionary black groups have regained our mind and our manhood. Therefore we no longer define the omnipotent administrators as 'the Man.' Matter of fact the omnipotent administrator along with his security agents are less than a man because WE define them as pigs! I think that is a revolutionary thing in itself. That's political Power. That's power itself. Matter of fact what is political power but the ability to define phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner?"50 Putatively, by renaming state authorities the Panthers in effect recuperate the mind and thereby rehabilitate the fractured manhood of the black male subject. Yet it seems that the reconstitution of this form of subjectivity is itself a radical political objective for Newton. What the party leader defines as revolutionary in this instance is not the radical restructuring of the social order, but the Panthers' very ability to redefine the terms of reality. The reclamation of manhood therefore becomes a circular and self-referential ideology that authenticates its own status as a sign of insurgency.

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The Lynchers and the Elusive "Mind" Wideman's novel exploits the slippages that emerged as revolutionary nationalists placed masculine consciousness at the forefront of their ideology. For Willie Hall the power of his plan hinges on the ability to remake the beleaguered manhood of black men. In one critical episode, he considers recruiting Anthony, a young hospital intern to help execute the plan, and he wonders if the young man has been "hopelessly unmanned already by his dependence" (173). After talking with the intern and discovering the youth's lack of political consciousness, Willie asserts, "Of what a clumsy, repetitious trap they've made of black manhood and how eagerly, foolishly you've performed your paces" (183). Willie's suspicions about Anthony's manhood are thus directly linked to the hospital worker's lack of political consciousness. The implication of Willie's assertion is that by introducing Anthony to Lyncher political theory he can rebuild the youth's consciousness and fortify his beleaguered manhood. This emphasis on reinventing male consciousness undermines the political cohesion of the Lynchers in consequential ways. Nowhere is this more true than in the portion of the narrative in which Graham Rice becomes utterly obsessed with developing a political theory of his own. Feeling himself unmanned and unappreciated by his fellow conspirators, Rice laments the fact that "there never seemed to be time or occasion for him to have his say" (198). He hopes to prove his theoretical sophistication to his comrades through an elaborate transformation of his own political consciousness. He creates a lexicon and ideology that he believes is on par with Willie Hall's plan. In this fantasy world, Rice's own name becomes the stuff of revolutionary intrigue, for "the word science Rice had developed was his history, religion, and consolation. His own name was a mystery to be studied, a node at which countless lines converged" (51). Upon further rumination on the "plots" that converge in his name, Graham Rice discovers that "rice was the sustenance of the poor man, the oppressed; that it was white because it came from the white man, the crumbs from his table, so much lotus for blacks and Chinamen to fight over" (52). He concludes that "in the very kernel of his being he understood exploitation and as a new Rice, conscious, revolutionary Rice he would feed his knowledge to the masses, in fact become food for their souls" (52). As humorous as Rice's revolutionary punning might be, the scene reveals a deadly serious problematic in the conspirators' model of revolution. Rice imagines that by overturning the symbols that constitute his own identity he can become a kind of eucharist for the revolutionary masses. Just as Willie Hall believes his plan is revolutionary precisely because of the masculine self that it underwrites, Rice believes that his theoretical musings are revolutionary because such mental processes redefine him as a conscious male subject.

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The novel makes its own skeptical position about Rice's restructuring of his political consciousness quite clear. Parrying Rice's radical punning with sharp irony, the narrator points out that Rice has no rice to eat: "Rice had forgotten to buy a new box of rice. When he turned Uncle Ben on his head, a short whisper of cascading grains barely covered the bottom of a cup" (52). Rice's longing to refashion a new consciousness by overturning the symbolic power relationships embedded in his name is equated with his turning over the racist Uncle Ben's icon. Both are ultimately ephemeral and largely symbolic gestures. Of course, a certain transformation of how people think necessarily attends a break with established customs and habits that reinforce a social order. Yet to acknowledge that fact does not nullify the novel's more cutting observation that these particular ideologies foreground identity in a way that makes it virtually impossible to avoid misrecognizing the subject of politics as its primary object. The narrative further establishes its skepticism about the conspirators' preoccupation with remaking manhood when Rice's paranoid exaltation of his own consciousness leads him to murder one of his coconspirators. Because Rice is obsessed with forging his personal construction of revolution, he becomes outraged by his lowly status among his fellow conspirators. Convinced of his own ability to craft revolutionary theory and embody it, he concocts elaborate paranoid scenarios in which he views his comrades as the saboteurs of his new identity. Rice's narcissistic obsession with his own political philosophy reaches its nadir when he sequesters himself in his basement apartment, armed to the teeth for a confrontation with his confederates. Isolated in the confines of his fantasy, he stands "naked in the black room farting once long and loud as if to test his reality against the cloying presence of the nightmare from which he was trying to awake" (241). Rice's delusion grows so potent that he needs to reassure himself constantly that his corporal self is still intact. He "patted the top of his skull. It was still there. Bushy covering reassuring bone." Following the cultural logic of his time, Rice labors to remake his manhood through the construction of a stable, coherent, political consciousness, only to find that this enterprise further atomizes the self. Just as Rice becomes lost in the circular fantasies of his revolution, so the Lynchers collectively are marooned in Willie Hall's revolutionary ideology. Though Willie imagines his plan as a project of collective liberation for a subjugated black polity, ultimately he only reproduces his own representations of revolution. As Cleaver and Newton often conflated synecdochic representations of the male subject with actual historical and material realities, so Willie's plan confuses symbols of radical social change with actual transformation of the social order. When Willie narrates the plan, the conspirators frequently become confused about what reality they

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inhabit: "Perhaps the battle had already been fought, a warp in time had hurled them forward to the aftermath of the plan, the city reduced to knee high ruins around them, blitzed by trees and three shivering human shapes all of life that remained" (231). So powerful is Willie's oratory that the conspirators imagine that Willie's revolution has been propelled by the mere narration of it. But the end result of the imaginary revolution is not the liberation of the people but the forging of a new Willie Hall. Remaking the Black Male Subject? Through the figure of the reluctant conspirator, Thomas Wilkerson, the novel also limns an alternative to the forms of self-fashioning that emerged in revolutionary ideology. In the process of evaluating his own discomfort with the logic of the Lynchers' plan, Wilkerson meditates on its fundamental premises and points out its inadequacies. As a result of this analytical process, Wilkerson decides to stop the lynching from taking place, a choice that results in his death at the hands of the deranged Graham Rice. In this sense Wilkerson's restless, probing consciousness most closely resembles the dialogic process through which the novel itself inhabits and disassembles revolutionary ideologies. Operating with an intellect that echoes a certain strain of modernist aesthetics, Wilkerson defamiliarizes and examines the constitutive assumptions of Willie's plan as a discourse separate from the mystification that gives the plan its aura of political authenticity.51 A cultural nationalist schoolteacher who cannot bring himself to believe in his own celebratory vision of black culture, Wilkerson possesses an extraordinarily reflexive consciousness—one that pulls apart everything from the logic of black nationalist education to the nature of revolutionary time (71-73, 83-84). Whereas Willie Hall's aestheticized oratory collapses distinctions between his desire for personal transformation on the one hand and radical political change on the other, Wilkerson disassembles this unity. In Willie's mind the construction of the lynching is not merely a matter of conventional politics, but rather a highly aestheticized form of ideology. Willie asserts, "A great artist must have conceived the first lynching. As a failed poet myself I envy his sweet touch, the sure hand that could extricate a satisfying stable form from the fantasies of his peers" (61). And he constantly emphasizes the aesthetic component of the Lynchers' plan, averring that "we must learn to do a thing correctly with style and for immediate appeal for the deep thinkers" (60). Willie's tendency to aestheticize lynching manifests itself further in his preoccupation with refashioning his own identity. Wilkerson perceives just such a connection when he reads one of Willie's poems. The poem describes "the castration of a bull framed ironically by images of soft white hands and maiden tears"

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(74). Wilkerson reads the poem and notes the presence of Willie's desire in the text: "These lines were all he could remember. And his impression of the whole. Quaint. Obscene. Funny. Pathetic. Then the one word. The sure word vivid as the lines he recalled. Transparent. You see through to the man. . . . With Littleman's poem an aesthetic judgement was not possible or necessary at the time. Just the unavoidable discomfort Wilkerson had felt as he stared at the words through to the human shape" (74-75). The poem is transparent because it forms a thin veneer between Willie's conception of himself as physically debilitated (a castrated bull) and the poem's symbolism. But even though Wilkerson perceives the disturbing way that Willie's own bodily and psychic integrity are at the heart of this ideology, at this point in the novel he cannot fully accept the implications of his own observation. Not until two disastrous events occur does Wilkerson fully acknowledge that the ideology codifying the lynching is fundamentally flawed by its undue emphasis on remaking the men who created it. The first disaster transpires when Wilkerson's father, Sweetman, murders a man who has been a family friend for years. The murder is the culmination of his father's lifetime of escapist retreats: philandering, drinking, and immersing himself in the abstractions of jazz music. The second event occurs when Willie attempts to mobilize a group of black citizens through his oratory and is assaulted by Philadelphia police. Just after the beating, Wilkerson visits Willie in the hospital and reflects on the fate of these two troubled men. As Wilkerson contemplates the relationship between the two events, he bridges the divide between domestic and public politics. "Wilkerson wanted to weep for Willie. For all the Willies and Sweetmen [Wilkerson's father] and shadows like himself dreaming puny dreams, alive at best in some muted fantasy underworld, lying, cheating, even killing to avoid the simple truth. How they dream of dignity, of vengeance, of confronting the immensity that dribbles out their portions, portions which barely fill a box, a can, the cold sheets of a hospital bed" (143-44). Wilkerson ultimately acknowledges Willie's plan as a fantasy of redemption. He begins to see the plan as a fiction that, like his father's escapades, only allows an imaginary resolution of a more intractable and material oppression. Looking down at the broken body of Littleman, Wilkerson thinks "his plotting consoled me only because I had a desperate need for consolation. Nothing intrinsically worthwhile in what he had to say. I stand over him. Larger than him, any vision of my future he can project" (144). In essence, Wilkerson, like the novel itself, can perceive the limits of Lyncher ideology precisely because he dismantles its totalizing logic. He separates his personal relationship to the lynching from its larger political meaning and thereby begins to extricate himself from Lyncher ideology. While Wilkerson's analysis certainly contains a deep compassion for what these men

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endure, his sympathy for their plight does not forestall his criticism of how they seek to remedy their predicament. Wilkerson at the same time registers the limits of the very skepticism that allows the novel to denaturalize revolutionary ideologies: "Sometimes I think there's nothing to me but that part you're describing. What goes on in my head, just because it's the head of Thomas Wilkerson becomes more important than anything else. The worst kind of selfishness" (112). He aptly recognizes that this tendency toward reflexive analysis borders on what one of the novel's critics calls his "mental masturbation."52 While the novel and Wilkerson certainly defamiliarize discourses in order to reveal their subjective and contingent claims, the novel also registers the potential for insularity and paralysis inherent in such a mode of consciousness. Nonetheless, if there is an alternative to the masculinist fantasies of the Lynchers and the Black Panthers, it is this rigorous reflexivity with regard to the claims made about the nature and substance of reality.

Wideman's Turnabout Strikingly, the novel's robust dissent from such masculinist ideologies has played no role in Wideman's recent commentary on the organization. On the contrary, his comments reveal his commitment to rewriting the Panthers as victims of the American government's repressive tactics. For the "Panthers were Black men rebelling against an America whose interests were best served by their silence, submission, extinction."53 Wideman recasts the Panthers' antagonistic relationship with police and other officials as yet another illustration of America's genocidal hostility toward black men. There is certainly ample evidence that federal and local officials were instrumental in the destruction of the Black Panthers, yet the organization's role as historical actors who also made certain kinds of ideologically driven political choices vanishes in Wideman's discussion. Should one take Wideman's suggestion regarding the Panthers' radicalism to heart, it seems more than reasonable to also ask that the limitations of their platform be considered as well. Put another way, one has to wonder why a vision of the Panthers as political exemplars has effectively trumped the model of dialectical engagement with revolutionary politics that one finds in The Lynchers. By tracing how masculinist ideologies continue to figure centrally in Wideman's intellectual relationship to sixties radicalism, one can more accurately assess how this turnabout came into being. From Wideman's portrait of the Panthers as paragons of masculine resistance to the images of "warrior-age men" united on the streets of Los Angeles, his "Dead Black Men and Other Fallout from the American Dream" epitomizes the masculinist bent of his recent commentary on the organization. Describing his experience of watching film clips of the

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organization just after the Rodney King beating, Wideman claims that "the will to survive was everywhere, explained everything, black leather, black berets, the military formation, guns in their cars parked around the funeral chapel, marches on the legislature in the state capitol, confrontations with the Oakland police. . . . Rituals of survival, indelible evidence of how seriously these young men took their lives . . . Surviving as black men was serious business."54 While certainly Wideman is interested in the Panthers because they represent an alternative to the random violence of gang warfare and rioting, he seems particularly fascinated by their enactment of masculine selfhood. Despite his claim that the Panthers represent the Los Angeles gang members' potential to be "organized, conscious, purposeful," the essay does not explore the actual platform that the organization constructed nor does it substantively engage the party's ideology. The group's storming of the state capitol to protest the passage of conservative legislation restricting the public's right to bear arms was not primarily a timeless "ritual of survival" as Wideman presents it. Rather, it was a political tactic to draw national attention to a political problem. Similarly, the Panthers' strategic patrol and observation of Oakland police officers was intended to curb rampant police brutality, and thus such actions cannot be reduced to survival ritual as such. Representing the Panthers in such anthropological terms removes their activism from the social context in which their calculated strategies of resistance had historically specific political meaning. Wideman's movement toward the affirmation of masculinist politics coincides with the emergence of a whole popular and academic discourse about the status of urban black males. This discursive shift materialized in the Reagan-Bush era when social scientists and journalists began to note the alarmingly high rates of incarceration, drug consumption and distribution, and violence affecting the lives of black urban males.55 Arguing that young black males had become an "endangered species," sociologists claimed that these men had been "miseducated by the education system, mishandled by the criminal justice system, mislabeled by the mental health system and mistreated by the social welfare system."56 A series of family crises in Wideman's life between 1975 and 1986 may have given a visceral reality to the alarm that sociologists and other cultural commentators sounded. In 1976, Wideman's brother Robby was given a lifetime prison sentence for his participation in a robbery in which an attendant was murdered. In 1986, Wideman's son, Jake, at the age of sixteen, was convicted of murdering a male peer and given a life sentence.57 Much of Wideman's subsequent work has attempted to reestablish connections to black males trapped in the American penal system. In Damballah (1981), Brothers and Keepers (1984), Philadelphia Fire (1990), and Fatheralong (1994) Wideman develops fictional and nonfictional

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techniques to reimagine his relationship to these male family members and to reintegrate them into a family history.58 As he remarks in a preface addressed to his incarcerated brother, Robby, Wideman imagines that "stories are letters. Long overdue letters from me to you. I wish I could tear down the walls. I wish I could snatch you away from where you are."59 Wideman's private reasons for privileging male relationships in his recent writings inadvertently align his work ideologically with a number of conservative men's movements that have labored to mobilize on the basis of traditional visions of masculinity. The author's rhetoric in Fatheralong echoes the patriarchal logic of the Million Man March, the Promise Keepers, and other social collectives.60 The essays in this text not only investigate the author's relationship with his own father and sons but also tie the bleak life prospects of black males in America to a historic and ongoing crisis in the relationship between black fathers and sons. Advocating the need to write black "Father stories" that establish "origins and through them legitimizing claims of ownership, of occupancy and identity," Wideman writes: The stories must be told. Ideas of manhood, true and transforming, grow out of personal exchanges between fathers and sons. Yet for generations of black men in America this privacy has been systematically breached in a most shameful and public way. . . . The power to speak, father to son is mediated or withheld; white men, and the reality they subscribe to stand in the way. Whites own the country, run the country ... the material reality speaks plainly to anyone who's paying attention, especially black boys who own nothing, whose fathers, relegated to the margins, are empty handed ghosts.61

Whether the actual concerns affecting the lives of these men are economic or political, the lost father represents and redresses them all. In the sense that the narrative imagines patriarchy and manhood as the foundation of emancipatory social arrangements, the argument—however well intentioned—resonates with the platform of the new conservatism. Even more striking about Wideman's formulation is the curious way that his rhetoric echoes the logic of the Black Panthers and the Lynchers. Although Wideman argues that the difficulties young black men face might be partially remedied by the return of the father or the resurgence of the Panthers' male survival rituals, such formulations can be troubled by asking whether a politics built on the desire to re-create black masculinity can adequately fulfill such an ambition. Certainly, The Lynchers contains a far more skeptical vision of the role that masculinity might play in the liberation of young black men. After Willie "Littleman" Hall's attempt to mobilize the masses via a symbolic redemption of black manhood fails, he tries to regroup by further indoctrinating Anthony, the young black hospital attendant. From his deathbed, Willie preaches to the

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young attendant—whose manhood Willie imagines is in need of revolutionary reconstruction. After interpellating Anthony through the political fantasies of the Lynchers, Willie dies leaving the proselyte to stew in this newfound radicalism. Marooned and confused by what path might lead toward freedom, Anthony strikes out in a random act of violence: "His bony black wrist is a scythe as it slashes through bottles, vials, tubes cups and glasses, all that sustains life in neat array atop the nurses' station" (264). The closing scene suggests that Willie's attempt to remake the attendant's ineffectual manhood results in the latter's desultory affirmation of his selfhood. In the spirit of Wideman's remarkable novel I have sought to outline a strategy of historical recovery that is in many respects a counter to the nostalgia of remembrance. The redemptive claims of revolutionary nationalism, however alluring, can be exalted neither through our longing for the totalities that nationalists promised nor through the exigencies of present crisis. Doing justice to the complex history that forged this social movement requires that we devote rigorous attention to the fault lines that the recourse to masculinity both exaggerated and produced. Thus, to revise our understanding of the gender politics produced by revolutionary nationalism is to confront the volatile contacts, the tenuous alliances, and the potential insurgencies that continue haunting us.

Chapter 3

Dark Intimacies: Sex, Nationalism, and Forgetting

In the eyes of many nationalists, their agendas could not be realized fully without reassessing the sexual ideologies that reinforced the racial subordination of African Americans historically. Sociologist Calvin Hernton articulated a pivotal rationale for turning toward the politics of intimacy in his pronouncement that the "white world's definition of Negro Sexuality has served to frustrate and arrest the political struggle of black people throughout the years."1 Only through what he terms the "negation of the white man's foul history" did he and others believe that blacks would "have a new quality" and become "a higher species of men and women on this earth."2 Advocates such as Hernton routinely framed the payoff of their ideology as a radical negation of a white nationalism that was itself predicated on the sexual abjection of black Americans. This cultural logic played itself out quite visibly in the controversy surrounding William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968). Nationalist stalwarts John Oliver Killens and Charles V. Hamilton took exception to the white southerner's representation of Turner as a figure who was both impotent and sexually obsessed with white women. In Hamilton's articulation the popularity of Styron's novel in "the American market" stemmed from the pejorative casting of Turner as a "fanatical black leader who held profound contempt for his people and who led them into a senseless bloodbath while all the while he dreamed of copulating with 'Miss Anne.'"3 Styron's critics thus affirmed their nationalist autonomy by discrediting his white supremacist coding of black male sexuality. If American nationalism was buttressed by its routine abjection of black male sexuality, this founding negation also provided the discursive moorings for the black nationalism that in turn contested it. Given the pervasiveness of such exchanges, it is remarkable that scholars have yet to examine the movement's sexualized nationalism. The sparse treatments on record surface primarily in feminist counters to masculine authority. Most notably, in her indictment of Black Power, Michelle Wallace submits, "[W]hen the black man went as far as the adoration

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of his own genitals could carry him his revolution stopped. A big Afro, a rifle, and a penis in good working order were not enough to lick the white man's world after all."4 Wallace's dismissive argument earned her widespread criticism, and as she argued later, the book's sweeping assertions eventually inspired her recanting.5 Even more revealing, however, is Wallace's presumption that her critique was especially singular. In proclaiming the argument's distinctiveness, she elided a broad spectrum of responses to black nationalist tactics of negation—among them expository critiques of the recourse to masculine sexuality as well as fiction and poetry that foregrounded the perils of politicizing male sexual agency. One way to reengage this complicated history is to turn to the work of Clarence Major and Hal Bennett, two authors whose substantial negotiations with Black Power sexual ideologies have been almost wholly neglected. Major and Bennett took issue with the movement's strategies for countering a white nationalism codified through speculary representations of the United States as a feminine body sexually threatened by black men.6 Their work is keenly attuned to the slippages and unanticipated compromises that black advocates encountered as they sought to dismantle the sexual ideologies that also comprised the movement's emancipatory agendas. These writers thereby confronted the fault lines that the Black Power movement was defined by, yet often evaded. A case in point is Major's Ail-Night Visitors, a work that focuses on Eli Bolton, a selfdescribed black nationalist whose commitment to phallocentric redemption only further entrenches him in the white supremacy that he seeks to atomize. The narrative underscores how Eli's endeavor to liberate himself though his erotic conquests reproduces his own dehumanization and that of the women who become mere tablets for the inscription of his political identity. In a similar vein Bennett's fiction from the late sixties and early seventies charts a crisis brought into being by the nationalist investment in phallic eroticism. His Lord of Dark Places follows the evolution of Joe Market, a character who engages in a nationalist campaign to invest his erotic experiences with the constitutive authority, order, and coherence traditionally attributed to the phallus. In one sense his pursuit of the phallus through the erotic creates a politics that perpetually reverts back to the merely carnal, the merely erotic. Moreover, the novel further troubles the nationalists' investment in phallocentrism by tracking their uneven relationship to homoerotic desire. The novel elaborates these contradictions in order to stage the implosion of a nationalist phallocentrism as a political category. Read in tandem, these literary works demonstrate that it is not enough to condemn nationalism for its phallocentrism because the movement's pursuit of phallic integrity summoned its own critical anatomies of this tactic.

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Clarence Major and the Wages of Forgetting In working to locate Clarence Major within the nationalism of the late 1960s, one necessarily confronts his adamant denial of such historical linkages. His autobiographical statements have been especially influential in casting him as a figure with only a negligible connection to the aesthetic and political agenda of the Black Power movement. He offers a version of this narrative in a 1998 interview in which he claims, "I was not really a part of that movement," and "I had been identified with it in some murky unclear way."7 From one vantage point his statements reflect an ambiguous solidarity with nationalists that is very much part of the historical record. According to Major, his own penchant for interracial intimacies was the source of some friction between himself and "other Afro-American poets associated with nationalist journals such as Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and the Journal of Black Poetry."8 These conflicts were only further heightened when poet Ed Spriggs asked fellow nationalist poets to boycott Major's poetry anthology The New Black Poetry (1969). The essential grounds for Spriggs's objection was that the "publisher was communist and white."9 To be sure, Major's integrationist sensibilities clashed with the separatist inclinations of cultural nationalists. And his catholic efforts to include black writers irrespective of their political identifications further rankled his nationalist counterparts. The controversy over the collection thus exacerbated a number of philosophical divides that would eventually lead Major to repudiate the nationalist agenda. Still, Major's autobiographical reflections also simplify his more complex and substantial engagement with black nationalism. Unlike Baldwin and Wideman, he straightforwardly promoted the turn toward nationalism in the movement's formative years. In 1966, after hearing the author speak on a panel to define "the reality of 'Black Power," a journalist recounted Major's argument regarding black male psychology: "[WJhite society's psychological paralysing [sic] of the black man . . . is predicated on his being properly ashamed of himself, his past, his culture."10 Anticipating the sentiments of Carmichael and Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Major argued that a devastating cultural assault was being waged against black men.11 And his commentary on the panel was only one indicator of his investment in the ideology of Black Power during this period. From his claim that "a revolutionary consciousness and a sense of nationalism are the quickest answers to the black man's plight in America" to his exhortation that the black writer "must chop away at the white criterion and destroy its hold on his black mind," Major's alliance with the movement was often emphatic and transparent before 1969.12

70 Chapter 3 Furthermore, as evidenced in his essay "Malcolm the Martyr," Major imagined that a central appeal of nationalist ideology was its capacity to reinvent black masculine identity. Lamenting the death of Malcolm X, Major avers, "[H]e reached the souls and minds of his black brothers who shall not let his name die—who shall not ever forget that dream of selfhood and nationalism he stood for."13 Or as he construes it in one of several poems he wrote eulogizing the slain leader, Malcolm "no longer / trusted the elites of the times. / Too strong in his manhood."14 These pieces validated Malcolm X not only as a leader of the new nationalist movement but as an architect of the ideological representations through which an emancipated masculine selfhood might be realized. At times, Major's interest in black nationalism seemed as much a longing for the construction of an ideal masculinity as an investment in the more practical platform of the movement. While initially black nationalist forms of masculinity appealed to Major, he soon began to perceive the limitations of these models. His littleknown essay "In Living Color: The New American Dream" constitutes his most conscious dissent from sexualized nationalism. Published in a 1969 edition of the counterculture organ New Left Notes, the piece takes "black revolutionaries" to task for their tendency to conflate Eros with racial politics: "[AJnybody who falls in love with an image, whether that image be charged with the tension of blackness or whiteness, is like some dense woman or priest of antiquity marrying a god figure, and is by the standards of professional brainpickers sick."15 Major presents the Black Power movement's overdetermination of Eros as a pathological form of false consciousness. In his sharp retort he claims, "[I] t is far more important to hold onto my humanity than to become the extension of somebody's idea."16 Categorically resisting the notion that black subjects should make such life choices strictly based on race, he refuses "to dress my mind in some temporary ideology."17 Major not only takes issue with the particular discursive claims of the movement's sexual politics but also refuses to be interpellated by any ideology that racializes his erotic attachments. Both the historical specificity of the sexual ideologies in Major's writings and the archival documents revealing the author's substantive ties to Black Power politics recommend a more rigorous history of his development. Not a figure known for his political activism, Major has been most often recognized for the remarkable range and eclecticism of his work. Author of more than twenty books that include poetry, fiction, critical essays, and lexicography, editor of significant anthologies of African American literature such as Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century AfricanAmerican Short Stories (1993) and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996), Major's stunning productivity led critic Bernard Bell to call him "one of our most challenging, multitalented, and

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prolific contemporary artists."18 Unfortunately, the project of recovering the nationalist dimension of Major's career has been further complicated by the 1999 publication of a new version of Ail-Night Visitors. Both author and editor cast this edition as truer to Major's original vision, yet stunningly absent from the revised text are many sections that make explicit reference to the Black Power era's sexual ideologies.19 By reconstructing the dialectic between Major's 1969 edition and the radicalism of the 1960s, in this chapter I labor to keep in play the defining tensions of a public culture that achieved remarkable vitality through its divisions.

Rereading the Erotics of Nationalism The critical reception of Major's All-Night Visitors has further occluded the narrative's nationalist origins in ways that are conspicuous and provocative. In many respects critics reproduce a strain of nationalist sexual ideology that is at odds with the novel's overall trajectory. A review of the work by Major's peer Ishmael Reed characterizes the novel as depicting "the black man at home with his body. The healthy hedonism often repressed by a sneaky and petty Puritanism affecting even the most radical black and white American writers."20 Framing this "talking vessel for black erotica" as a frontal assault on the culture's repressive bourgeois decorum, Reed voiced a common perspective in nationalist and New Left ideology. More recently, Reed's affirmative reading of the novel's eroticism has been seconded in James W. Coleman's argument that through the erotic Major pursues "the potentialities of black male expression" and codes "the black phallus" as a symbol of "productivity and proliferating meaning."21 While the merits of the narrative were primarily social for Reed, Coleman equates the erotic with a generative aesthetic—one that is itself an upshot of the novel's phallocentrism. Certainly the novel contains ample evidence to support these affirmative readings of its eroticism. Major's narrative represents the politicization of Eros by framing Eli Bolton's sexual encounters in opposition to the oppressive discipline of military service during the Vietnam War. Eli's combat experience traumatizes him to such an extent that his conception of himself as a subject unified in mind and body explodes. As he phrases it when describing the experience of having a breakdown during battle, "I've lost control of my muscles, I'm down in the mud, I see the dreary murky cadence of my blue black self.. .. Emptiness, chromatic hangs in my psychic clashing hold on the present; my ribs are moving up and down, defeated, I am a wet skull in the mud."22 The images of decapitation and bodily displacement demonstrate how battle dissolves Eli's conception of himself as a psychic and corporal whole. By contrast, upon returning to the states, Eli discovers in sex a ritual that is like his "sudden

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ability to construct bookshelves, or create a silly wacky lovely painting, equal to anything I do involving the full disclosure of myself" (101). While combat produces a sense of fragmentation and alienation in Eli, sex allows him to imagine himself remade as a subject able to express the essence of his being through his avocation. Granting the presence of this clear opposition, critics who privilege the novel's affirmative vision of Eros gloss over the contradictory ways that Eli's self-fashioning is routed through the sexual discourses of black and white nationalisms. The specter of an American nationalism that emerged between the dismantling of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow haunts Major's novel and Black Power discourse more broadly. Sandra Gunning eloquently describes its representational schema in her claim that American "society and civilization came increasingly to be figured as the white female body: silent, helpless, in immediate need of protection from the black beast."23 By prohibiting black men sexual access to white females— in ideology and practice—white Americans inscribed their denial of blacks' right to participate in the body politic and rationalized their violent repression of a race.24 Ail-Night Visitors begins its negotiation with this founding ideology by staging its pernicious effects on Eli. The turn is robustly evidenced in the way the novel treats his sexual relationship with his white lover Cathy. Typical of the novel's fragmented recounting of events, the narrative does not provide a great deal of background about their affair but instead stresses the significance of their sex life for Eli's self-fashioning. Eli claims, "[H]er softness her genital mystery engulfed the thick swollen loneliness of myself. Shooing away the bats, the scarecrows, the Warden and everything! And my false impression of white pussy! and frigidity!" (130). Eli's Utopian account of their erotic relationship indicates that these encounters have the potential not only to enable the couple's transcendence of their personal neuroses but to erase Eli's anxieties about the taboos governing white female sexuality. But when Cathy decides that she is going to return to her home in California and break off her relationship with Eli, he replaces his vision of sex as a race-neutral haven with a fantasy that is itself a product of American nationalism. Embittered by the fact that Cathy is leaving, Eli imagines that he takes her to a public place where he proceeds to rape her. The fantasy that Eli terms "a psychic intervention" and a "projected trip" removes their sexual encounter from private to public space in a way that seems to parallel the intrusion of nationalist ideology into their sex life (24). Avenue A and 12th street is usually decorated by the macking presence of New York's finest, you dig; I suddenly wish there were—so the classic crime could have the third dimension, that is, the Memorial Day quality of my honor in this society along with the lynched, castrated body of myself in national image in the present

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urgent rite to preserve her, and this grand murdering is by no means even a slightly low way ofjeffing—it is upstanding like a motherfucker, dig it! All the way up to the real down magic of the Gods. . . . "What's going on down there?" demands a face I can only visualize since my back is turned to its owner's moral responsibility, his chaste dedication to protect white womanhood. (27-28)

By casting the rape as a "Memorial Day" ceremony in which he risks castration at the hands of those who defend white womanhood, Eli assigns meaning to his imagined sexual violence through the very terms provided in the discourse of white nationalism. His dream of a humanist relationship between racially unmarked equals dissipates amidst this unconscious eruption of white nationalist ideology. And while Eli certainly links his assault to the dehumanizing effects of white nationalism, he also interweaves his violent desire with the insurgency of black civil unrest. Just before the fantasy sequence begins, Eli gazes out the window of his New York apartment and notes that rioters have set fire to an adjacent neighborhood. He views the rebellion as a "gigantic moment in which surgical-like perfected social-forces, born out of a system of slavery and lies in which we have hustled are bringing down the bridges, all the prisons, the stockyards of the self; and I am seriously thinking of killing Cathy, to keep her body here if nothing else" (16). In Eli's imagination the rioting brings about a potential psychological and material emancipation for the members of the neighboring black "ghetto" just as his dream of sexual assault takes on insurgent meaning for him. His easy movement between sexual violence and mass revolt was fairly commonplace during the period. So much so that the black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs could argue without qualification that the sexual lives of black male rioters were replete with psychic battles like Eli's: "[W]here sex is employed as armament and used as a conscious and deliberate means of defense, it is the black man who chooses this weapon. If he cannot fight the white man openly, he can and does battle him secretly. Recurrently the pattern evolves of black men using sex as a dagger to be symbolically thrust into the white man."25 In the sexual conquests of young black men these psychiatrists found the primal desire to possess the phallic authority of white men. At the same time, Grier and Cobbs unwittingly reveal how the quest for that authority expresses a homoerotic desire that often went unexamined by nationalists. Eli then shares with Black Power advocates a penchant for refuting white supremacist nationalism by rewriting post-Reconstruction narratives regarding interracial sex and violence, and like them he is remarkably unreflexive about the ambiguities that this dialect produces. In a register analogous to All-Night Visitors other works of the era were invested in equating sexual violence and emancipation. Most notoriously Eldridge Cleaver represents his serial rapes of white women as part of a

74 Chapter 3 liberating "revolutionary sickness" that keeps "the black man" perpetually "out of harmony with the system that is oppressing him."26 Despite some tepid remorse about his history, Cleaver holds onto the notion that his assaults embody a broader process of communal revolt. Certainly, his self-serving apologia must be seen as distinct from the literary representation of assault as an ideological device, yet the widespread acceptance of his claims also demonstrates how symbolic and material violence worked together to naturalize the insurgent potential of sexual assault. Along these lines Amiri Baraka's drama labored to interpellate the black national collective through a speculary representation predicated on sexual violence against white women. Madheart (1967), a seminal work produced in the heyday of Baraka's nationalist period, revolves around the ritual assault of a white woman whom the text construes as a metonym for white supremacy more broadly. Baraka's "Devil Lady" makes her own symbolic status readily apparent when she asserts the power of her sexuality: "Enter the prize. I am the prize. I am dead. And all my life is me. Flowing from my vast whole, entire civilizations."27 The Devil Lady's metonymic pun on "whole" and "hole" equates white women's reproductive capacity with Western civilization. Therefore when the play's hero, Black Man, stabs the Devil Lady, he affirms its broad cultural significance: "[D]ie, you bitch, and drag your mozarts into your nasty hole. .. . [D]rag it in and down with you, your office-buildings blow up in your pussy, newspapers poison gasses congolene brain stragglers devising ways to deal death to their people, your smiles, your logic. . . . I am the new man of the earth."28 In one sense the phallic stabbing of the white female body itself is a rape that allegorizes the black man's assault on white civilization. Even the depiction of the products of Western culture being stuffed back into her womb suggests rape. In this regard, the Black Man's very language aspires to the material agency of a phallic assault. And binding together this ideological counter to American nationalism is the production of the black nationalist subject himself through violation and profanation of the white nation's symbolic incarnation. This politicization of sex and violence ultimately produced contending views about the political content of male sexuality among nationalists themselves. The sexualized nationalism in Melvin Van Peebles's film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was an especially visible catalyst for such contention. A paradigmatic instance of the film's sexual politics shows the hero Sweet Sweetback being accosted by a group of rogue bikers and forced to engage in a test of his sexual powers. The bikers demand that Sweetback prove his mettle against a formidable rival, a large red-headed white woman with the nickname "Prez." As evidenced by both the white woman's presidential nom de guerre and one character's reference to the sexual duel as an expression of "democracy," the contest allegorizes

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a political battle between the forces of white nationalism and an ascendant black nationalism. When Sweetback ultimately forces his opponent to howl from her uncontrollable orgasm, he strikes a blow against the white nation and consolidates his own political identity. It was in part the film's attribution of revolutionary content to its hero's sexual prowess that inspired debate in the early seventies. While New York Times reviewer Clayton Riley and Huey P. Newton lauded this nexus of sex and revolt, Lerone Bennett undermined such optimism by claiming, "[I]t is necessary to say frankly that nobody ever fucked his way to freedom. And it is mischievous and reactionary for anyone to suggest to black people in 1971 that they are going to be able to screw their way across the Red Sea."29 Bennett's critique is particularly noteworthy, for even as he repudiates the claims about the film's radical sexuality, he does not abandon the insurgent potential of sex. Instead, he calls for a representation of sex that would prove more liberating because it makes "a clear and black distinction between the white man's sexy and true black sexuality."30 Even this nationalist, who was more critical of the era's preoccupation with phallic sexuality, criticized the movement only to reassert the primacy of revolutionary sex in other terms. Indeed, one model of sexual economy that Bennett does approve with minor qualification is the patriarchal domestic arrangements of the Nation of Islam.31 Major's Ail-Night Visitors troubles the movement's sexual ideology with greater acuity and sweep than does Bennett. Eli's fantasies of sexual violence are all couched in reverential terms that express his desire to preserve Cathy as a sacrament of white supremacist nationalism. Fantasizing at one point about devouring Cathy like a cannibal, Eli asserts, "I cannot go on living without having at least a fragment of my spiritual bride, my white limbed mistress" (20). This cannibalization metaphor is extended when Eli claims, "If a bird eats a bug, that does not end the bug's meaning, its essence. I am devoutly religious and will eat the flesh of my goddess as a sacrament. To preserve the shina, ne, vortsel, gizr, juuri, wilrzel racine, the root of her, in me. In my heart" (21). As Eli's religious rhetoric and his recourse to foreign terms meaning "root" (wurzel, racine) and "genuine or authentic" (shina) suggest, he believes that his violence against Cathy is an act that will allow him to internalize her as a kind of spiritual essence. The novel presents Eli's desire to destroy the white female body as an incorporation of her into himself, as a form of black male selffashioning that depends on reverence for the symbols of white nationalist fantasy. If there is a model of black nationalist identity being produced in this assault on the white female body, that identity is also utterly dependent on that corporeality for its existence. Major's novel rewrites the Black Power movement's preoccupation with destroying and violating white female bodies as an obsession that demands that the subject preserve

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and internalize the kernel of its ideological form. While nationalists stressed that this counterideology had the capacity to free the black male subject from the legacy of hegemony, the novel highlights the method by which this fantasy further imbricates the subject with white nationalism. The narrative further troubles Eli's investment in whiteness by outlining the exploitation of female sexuality inherent in Eli's nationalism. He believes that the violation of Cathy is a radical transgression of white supremacist constraints on black male sexuality, but the text registers the dehumanizing consequences of Eli's desire. Reflecting on his rape of Cathy, he proclaims, "I am like a nightmare patriarch responsible to no one but myself—therefore, no longer human, ugly as the root of vulgarity itself!" (25). The novel disrupts any notion that this model of selffashioning facilitates the creation of a liberated mode of being when it codes Eli's desire for phallic and patriarchal domination as a monstrous transformation. And the monstrous quality of Eli's desire to transgress white supremacist sexual taboos even haunts his dreams. Recasting the sexual ideologies that Eli attempts to enact in his waking life, his dreams reveal to him the repressed horror of his own sexual ideology. As Slavoj Zizek posits, dreams allow a subject to consciously recognize the more fundamental desires and anxieties that underlie a given ideological fantasy.32 In his words, "it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening—that is the Real of our desire."33 The dream in question begins with an image of Eli "trying to hump" Cathy in "her milky snow white rump. . . . I feel like I'm high on something really forbidden" (138). Interpreting this sexual encounter as a transgression of white supremacist taboos, Eli imagines that "white eyes will surely be murdered by our presence on the shadows of the moon. I am a missile, very fecundative" (138-39). The sex act becomes a martial attack on the white nation/ body, and Eli revels in his transgression. However, the novel does not allow this political interpretation of the dream to persist. The sexual violation condenses into a surreal horse race in which one of the horses sexually violates Cathy. Eli observes as his politicized assault is recoded: "What? Who's that?! It's impossible! It's Cathy! On hands and knees, hideously alarmed, trying to get up out of the mud as Roy of Troy whams it to her, straight into her bottom, prancing along, keeping pace with her revulsive and sad rhythms, as she vigorously tries to shake the mud and stand up" (240-41). Only when the dream restages Eli's assault on white nationalism as a bestial attack on Cathy does he perceive the sheer brutality latent in his own ideology. The dream stresses that his political narrative displaces his longing to reign in Cathy's autonomy through violence and his hunger to possess the absolute authority of a masculinist white nationalism. As the dream continues, Eli becomes so revolted by the implication of his own desire that he attempts to "rescue her" by working

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to "lasso the horse's firearm" with his belt. Eli proceeds to "buckle it, get a good grip and pull with all the strength I have" (141). Tugging at the horse's genitalia with his own belt, Eli defends Cathy from the very kind of sexual domination that he imagines will emancipate him in his living reality. Indeed, the text acknowledges the devastating impact that this fantasy might have on the white female victim in ways that nationalists such as Cleaver and Baraka never do. For instance, Cleaver felt mild remorse for his rapes only because it affected his own humanity and not because of the effect on the women he attacked.34 Far from affirming Black Power advocates' assertions that violence against symbolic and actual white female bodies liberates black men psychically, Major's novel foregrounds the ways that the Utopian telos of revolutionary transformation actually represses black nationalist desire to possess the whiteness that it opposes. The novel then writes into being the anxieties that attend a dialectic of revolution in which black nationalists believe that they are destroying the first term, when in fact their ideology is inextricably bound to and desirous of it. Eli's dream also foregrounds the novel's response to a broader cultural anxiety about the relationship between its phallocentric eroticism and the brutalization of women. Critic Bernard Bell is concerned about precisely this matter when he suggests that "some readers, especially radical feminists, may be outraged by what they consider the offensive, phallocentric objectification and abuse of women in the novel."35 In the sense that Eli's expressions of eroticism are rooted in his genital pleasure, one cannot deny that the novel reproduces the kind of phallocentrism that feminists such as Catherine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Susan Jeffords mark as an expression of the male subject's traditional domination of women.36 Nevertheless, one must also bear in mind that Eli's path of development leads him to view Eros and sexual violence in decidedly dystopian terms. Which is to say that the text both depicts scenes of phallocentricism and stages their perilous excesses. A pivotal instance of this duality occurs during Eli's tour of duty in Vietnam when he witnesses his fellow soldiers' sexual assault on a young Vietnamese girl. Through the lens of a work like Jeffords's groundbreaking study, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989), one might interpret this rape scene as another illustration of the phallic violence that she claims is constitutive of Vietnam War narratives. She argues that such scenes of sexual assault were on the one hand essential to the historical modes of domination enacted by American soldiers during the war and, on the other hand, a central trope in fictional representations of the Vietnam War.37 Jeffords asserts further that narrative representations of the Vietnam War stage "sexual encounters, pornographic images, and sexually motivated vocabularies" to reestablish war as "the last 'pure' theater for the masculine bond" and "the most efficient structural space for the figuration

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of gender difference"38 Because these scenes of violence generally occur within texts that minimize racial and class differences between male soldiers, these spectacles work to reify the intractability of gender difference and hierarchy.39 In contrast to Jeffords's model, when Eli witnesses the rape of the Vietnamese woman and attempts to stop it, the scene does not repress other social distinctions to valorize the masculine bond. Rather, the scene outlines the racial and ideological divide between Eli and the two white soldiers who rape the girl. As we came around the corner we saw Mokus' big naked pink ass beneath a bush, struggling updownupdown, humping what looked like a child with dirty knees, no shoe; her muffled moans trapped inside something massive like his fist. . . . Bud and I were so numbed by the sadistic inhuman monstrous incident we couldn't react. . . for a moment; then we rushed in, our rifles down; still Smith threw his up directly in our faces. 'Just take it easy Jackson," which is what he calls all niggers . . . and he actually thought we wanted to share in the activity in which he and Doky Magnus were engaged. I moved my leg. "I'll pull the trigger just as sure as my name's Smitty. I'll kill a nigger jus as soon as I'll kill a VC." (73)

Eli and his black friend are horrified by the assault. They only fail to stop the rape because their lives are threatened by their fellow soldier. The rape scene accentuates the breach between the two white soldiers who view the assault as a warranted expression of their imperial dominance and the black soldiers who view it as a violently inhumane ritual. While Jeffords correctly points out the centrality of sexual violence in Vietnam War narratives, one need not neglect the sometimes contentious relationship between texts and the ideologies they reference. In the case of Major's narrative, such an interpretation might lead readers to condemn the novel without acknowledging its vexed relationship to the phallocentrism that it inhabits and negates.

Hal Bennett's Dark Places The curious amnesia that has shaped the critical reception of Clarence Major's nationalist phase finds its match in the nearly complete oblivion that envelopes Hal Bennett's fiction. In the nearly thirty years since the publication of his last literary novel, Seventh Heaven (1976), Ronald Walcott's 1974 essays on Bennett's fiction remain the only extended treatments of his work published in English. Moreover, until Lord of Dark Places was reissued in 2001, Bennett's five novels and one short story collection languished out of print for decades. That vanishing is especially stunning given that Bennett was heralded as one of the most promising novelists of the Black Power era. He was awarded a prestigious fiction fellowship from the Breadloaf Writer's Conference in 1966, and four years

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later he was named one of the nation's most promising writers by Playboy. This auspicious beginning was reinforced in the early critical reception of his work. In a review of Bennett's The Black Wine (1968) novelist Charles Wright argues that Bennett's "fantasy bits have the madness and cold logic of early Capote."40 And on the pages of Harper's, Irving Howe included Bennett's novels in a review that purported to identify the most forward-looking black fiction writers of the day—among them the betterknown figures Ishmael Reed, James Alan McPherson, John A. Williams, and William Melvin Kelley. Howe touts Bennett as a "writer of great seriousness and potential," a figure who might produce "something like what Faulkner did for Yoknapatwha county."41 Admittedly, Howe's praise was tempered by the charge that the novels were also "wildly uneven and sometimes atrocious."42 But even these qualifications did not augur the dramatic disappearance witnessed over the last few decades. Howe's assessment of Bennett gestures toward a way to read this marginalization that is less dependent on qualitative aesthetic assessment. In a maneuver that also shaped the reception of McPherson and James Baldwin, he sets Bennett in opposition to the "pseudorevolutionary/m50n" popularized by the Black Arts movement.43 Imposing a traditional binary between craftsmanship and propaganda, Howe and other critics ignored the robust exchanges taking place among writers across lines of ideology and aesthetics. In this regard, critics separated Bennett from an essential development animating his craft and politics. And even more recent scholars such as Bernard Bell and Darryl Dickson-Carr, who both locate Bennett within a black tradition of experimental fiction, have foregrounded transhistorical aesthetic continuities rather than historical specificity.44 This separation of Bennett from Black Power ideology was further reinforced by the particular brand of historicism that critics brought to bear on his material. In the early seventies, commentators were well aware that Bennett's Lord of Dark Places was engaged in a critical anatomy of the sexual ideologies that had defined black male sexuality historically. Walcott, for instance, argues that the novel is an "all but scatological attack on the phallic myth, the original American folk drama in which the white female as virgin and bitch goddess and the Black man as defiler and nigger stud are the two central figures."45 And more astutely, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer presents the narrative as one in which a black male character who uses sexuality as a weapon becomes "the body's victim. If his phallus is a weapon, then he is debased by its use."46 Particularly noteworthy in these assessments is the awareness of the subtlety with which Bennett engaged the sexual ideologies that were foundational to American nationalism. At the same time, neither Bennett's initial reviewers nor more recent critical treatments reference the ways in which the very preoccupation with sexualized nationalism was an extension of Black

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Power ideology. Bennett's fiction therefore warrants a historicist reading that probes the ideological overlays that constitute its political and aesthetic project. His Lord of Dark Places asks readers to imagine the political consequences of a sexual politics that many nationalists construed as the essence of rebellion. A chief engine of the narrative is the political and ontological crisis produced when Joe Market and his father Titus labor to redress the history of southern lynching by imbuing Joe's body with the symbolic content of the phallus. This primal crisis sets the stage for Joe's ongoing inability to distinguish the erotic from the coherence and authority of the phallus. Especially illuminating in the text is how this misrecognition ultimately dismantles the very phallic order that was so essential to the nationalism of the Black Power era. The Market clan's difficulties are rooted in the history of racial violence that shaped their experiences in Jim Crow Virginia. Just after the close of World War I, Titus's father, Roosevelt, a man who labors mightily to be conciliatory to whites in the South, is lynched when he is accused of having "winked" at one of the "white ladies in town."47 Roosevelt's accommodation becomes the object of the novel's satire when the narrator describes him as being so obsequious that even though his purported wink was in all likelihood a tic, he would have approved the reprisal "if he had only known why they were lynching him in the first place" (3). After Roosevelt's murder, Titus vows to "do anything to keep that from happening to a son of his" (4). In a stunning compensatory gesture, Titus creates "The Church of the Naked Child" (later changed to The Church of the Naked Disciple), a traveling nationalist cult that centers on the redemptive worship of Joe's magnificent sexual organ. Titus had "read about cults that worshipped the tail [penis] of a man and he decided to make that and the naked male black body central parts of his religious symbolism" (15). Father and son roam the South collecting funds from male and female donors who are routinely granted the opportunity to be baptized through sexual encounters with Joe. In addition to these pecuniary and erotic enticements, Titus offers converts a lofty promise of racial political salvation. Sermonizing to the people, he asks, "How can a black man find redemption in a white man's world? Who can rescue us from the penalties of God's violated law. No white man can do that—he's too full of sin himself. So what I say is that we need a new Redeemer, a black savior, someone who will deliver us not only from God's wrath, but from the white man's as well!" (18). In scenes like this one, the novel makes explicit the association between the religious cult and a black nationalist agenda that promises political freedom through the phallus. If in the Fanonian sense the black man exists in the West as a kind of "walking phallus," Titus and nationalists such as Cleaver and Van Peebles adopt this condition not as a sign of black negation but as the means of liberation.

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Titus's Utopian gloss on phallic nationalism is not shared by the novel. From the outset, the narrative traces Joe's ambivalent relationship to his father's labor to fashion him as the communal phallus. When Titus initially recruits Joe to become the Messiah of the new faith, he does so on the occasion of Joe's mother Ramona's death—an eventuality brought about as Titus's sexual appetites take their toll on her broken body. Once Titus has effectively erased Ramona through his pursuit of phallic power, he initiates Joe into the faith by performing fellatio on him. While Titus views the encounter as an initiation to be celebrated, Joe only "felt evil and empty" (13). The foundations for Titus's nationalist project are therefore tainted both by the troublesome sacrifice of the mother (and indeed the feminine) as well as the father's incestuous eroticization of Joe. The text signals one of the chief consequences of this incestuous conversion when it references Joe's feeling of emptiness. That is, Joe experiences an interpellative crisis in which any interiority he believed himself to possess is hollowed out as he is remade in his father's speculary representation of his being. As a consequence, throughout the novel Joe is always troubled by the wages of his particular misrecognition, the sense that the phallic self he pursues is a phantom substitution. Joe's peculiar crisis—his labor to embody the coherence, authority, and order of the phallus on the one hand and his vulnerable flesh on the other—is often brought to the foreground in the narrative's treatment of nationalism. Even as Titus invests Joe's sexuality with liberating potential for black Americans, Joe soon discovers that his status places him in a more compromised position. In one such instance Joe takes a break from displaying himself on the traveling circuit and walks around New Orleans alone. Intoxicated by his own allure, he thinks, "I am The Naked Disciple" and this "seemed a very real and beautiful thing to be," for "[h]e was the Peter in his pants" (37). Once Joe assumes the phallic being attributed to him, he encounters a policeman and imagines his own spectacular selfhood affecting this agent of the state: "A white cop looked at him, but his Peter just got harder. Fuck you jack. You want to suck my big black peter? You white motherfucker, I know you want to suck my big black Peter" (37). The fantasy here is that the very spectacle of Joe's member will cause even state authority to cede its autonomy before him. In short order the policeman returns Joe's gaze and interrupts the latter's sense of his own appeal: "Bam! Just like that, he thought about those white boys on the road yesterday. They'd just wanted to fuck him. That cop, he looked like he would fuck him. Joe sped up. His peter fell soft, and shriveled against his leg" (38). The mere assertive gaze of the police officer punctures the veneer of phallic authority thatJoe celebrates. Consequently, Joe's first anxiety is that the authority that he and Titus covet will reassert itself and "fuck him" handily.

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The narrative pursues this representational logic further once Joe gives the slip to the policeman. As he continues walking, he comes across a house where a white woman stands in her yard beside a sign that reads, "Keep Out! Niggers, Dogs, Catholics, Beggars, Peddlars, & etc." The woman, tantalized by the prospect of transgressing the legacy of racial segregation, insists that Joe have relations with her. At first he recoils in fear and trembling at the potential offense, but he is subsequently drawn in by the prospect of using his body to breach the law: "White bitch I'm going to kill you with my Peter. Lord he wished he could ram it down her white fucking throat! He'd kill her that way, all the big black peter he had choking her down her throat" (44). In a moment reminiscent of the violence in works such as Madheart, Joe's fantasy is one of negation through inversion—the phallic body so demonized in the rhetoric of white supremacy destroying the symbol of white national integrity. However, the scene is one in which his body never achieves the autonomy of the insurgent. Rather, she takes pleasure in the mastery of naming the boundaries, setting the limits of contact, compelling transgression: "Oh . . . I'd admire having that hard thing in me. But I can't get out there because my Daddy hates for me to mess around with niggers. That's why he keeps the gate locked. And you can't come in here either, I certainly don't have to tell you why." "So how we going to do it?" He thought he would die from excitement. "Stick it through the fence." (42) Bound by the fence and her capacity to direct the encounter, any prospect of insurgency on his part is contained by the existing ideology of white supremacy. Even the pleasure that Joe desires is produced by the interplay of prohibition and transgression that constitutes the Jim Crow rape scenario itself. In staging Joe's shuttling between the fantasy of choking white supremacy with its own representation and his realization that he is but a product of its design, the novel illuminates the boundaries and bindings of sexualized nationalism. As the narrative unfolds, it also becomes clear that the contradictions constituting Joe's investment in the phallus explodes the phallic order that he seeks. The Church of the Naked Disciple disbands when Titus decides that the best way to ensure its ascendancy is to sacrifice Joe to the police and make him a martyr. Joe eludes capture, but even once he is unmoored from the church, he continues to seek political and individual redemption through his pursuit of the phallus. That quest continues to motivate him from the end of the church in 1955 through his life in New Jersey in the 1960s, and into his military service in Vietnam. The corrosive consequences of this paradox are highlighted sharply in the

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novel's treatment of homosexuality. Dickson-Carr cursorily alludes to the historical dimension of this development in relation to Black Power when he submits that Bennett's novel "disregards" the "era's nationalistic image of manhood via characters that deny any easy sexual categorization."48 But Lord of Dark Places cannot be understood as positing a mere opposition to the masculinist homophobia of Eldridge Cleaver and others. This is a text that traces the oppositions that the movement produced between the effeminate homosexual and the masculine nationalist only to demonstrate how those oppositions create the conditions of their own collapse. The novel sets this dynamic in motion through the representation of Joe's contradictory assessment of his sexual liaisons with "queers." Broke and impoverished when he travels north to New Jersey, he begins a life "hustling" gay men by allowing them to perform fellatio on him. He wonders whether "he might not be turning queer himself, having so much to do with queers. Man he couldn't dig that shit. He was going to prove he still liked women" (81-82). This longing to recover the compromised opposition between straight and queer results in a scene of performative absurdity in which he places "dusted powder under his armpits and groin" to pay a visit to a woman named Mavis. She greets him with the charge that he smells "like a woman," and by prodding his anxieties about feminization, she undoes his aspiration (82). The comedy of misrecognition here implies that Joe's performative assertion of masculinity aims to recover a boundary that has already vanished or indeed never existed at all. Furthermore, the primary impetus of homosexual sex in Joe's experience is not from gay men but from the incestuous homoerotic love that Titus expresses in worshiping the phallus. In putting pressure on the implicit homoeroticism undergirding phallocentric nationalism, Bennett's novel takes pleasure in framing the nationalist desire for the phallus as the root of its undoing. The overlays between Joe's hunger for phallocentric authority and his anxieties about his sexual identification are thrown into relief in more clearly nationalist terms at another juncture. While taking a class at a local college Joe listens with envy as his instructor narrates the founding of America as the product of Columbus's will: "Man, that Christopher Columbus must have been a really swinging cat, discovering America like he had. Joe started calling his dick Christopher, and he addressed it quietly in the third person whenever it tried to make discoveries on its own. Now Christopher I know you dig women, there ain 't nothing queer about you' (82-83). Through this unholy christening, the text represents the interdependence of a historical narrative that casts Columbus as the father of the new nation and Joe's hunger to grant himself that same phallic authority. The scene worries this acquisitive enterprise by foregrounding the anxious repression of homosexuality that necessarily attends the construction of

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a phallocentric nationalist identity. Joe's assertion of his heterosexual desire only manifests itself in the face of his hunger for Columbus's phallic authority. The internal contradictions besetting a nationalism that defines itself through the negation of the homosexual are fodder for other comedic masquerades as well. This is especially true in Joe's relationship with a closeted gay man with the unfortunate moniker Lamont Cranston. Named by his mother in homage to the actor who was the voice of the Shadow on the popular radio program, Lamont figures as a burlesque foil as Joe labors to enforce the opposition between the phallocentric and the homosexual. Joe "didn't especially like Lamont because of his 'sissified' manner and his Tearl Bailey voice,'" yet this animus stems from the unseemly resemblance of the two men (105). What Joe loathes most about Lamont is the fact that he "was such a sissy that he did his best to come on like a real he-man. Which just made him sound more like Pearl Bailey" (106). In a sense, then, the persistent disintegration of Joe's own endeavors to possess and indeed to become the phallus are reflected back to him in the shadowy masquerade of Lamont. This anxiety of resemblance is at its most satirical extreme in an instance when Joe agrees to help Lamont prove his heterosexuality to the latter's mother, a figure who routinely questions her son's sexual orientation. Joe agrees to help Lamont in order to convince the effeminate man to partner with him when he joins the army. Joe's rationale for joining the army is that military service contains "the highest example of hardy manhood," and thus the two men share a desire to forge a legitimate masculine identity (115). In order to shore up Lamont's allegiance, Joe concocts a ridiculous plan to steal a turkey and hand it to Lamont's mother as evidence of her son's initiative and masculinity. Their plan to instantiate a masculine selfhood via turkey theft and military service quickly disintegrates. Even though they succeed in stealing the turkey, Lamont bemoans, "' [M]y mother didn't even eat that turkey, she said it was too tough. So she cut it up in pieces that she wrapped in tinfoil and kept in the icebox for the cat" (121). And Joe's longing for a more traditional manhood reaches its nadir when during battle he is shot "in the groin," only narrowly escaping the bullet's "shooting away his testicles" (132, 133). In Bennett's novel, the closeted gay man and the phallocentric nationalist pursue the same speculary ideal, and it is in tracking the impossibilities of becoming inherent in their pursuit that Bennett's novel carves out its dark satire. Particularly intriguing about this rendering of nationalist sexual politics is the way that it both confirms and pushes back against the observations of queer theorists such as Robert Reid-Pharr and Dwight McBride. These thinkers have opened up a crucial dialogue about the ways in which

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heteronormative nationalisms maintain their hegemony through the abjection and negation of the homosexual subject.49 Reid-Pharr describes Black Power nationalism's routine hostility toward the homosexual as an assault on "the scapegoat, the sign of chaos and crisis" in order to "return the community to normality to create boundaries around blackness, rights that white men are obliged to recognize."50 Bennett's novel tracks out a similar quest for order in Joe's nationalism but further probes the inadequacies of this nationalist logic. Indeed, such congruity only bolsters the case that queer theory, like other strains of postidentity critique, extends an interrogation that was already present within the Black Power era. So that, while scholars such as Reid-Pharr and Ron Simmons duly take black nationalism to task for reproducing the binary opposition between the homosexual and a normative black masculinity, their critiques would be enriched by a consideration of the critical interrogation that was part of this historical moment.51 In this way, Bennett's work poses a distinctive challenge to presentist readings of the era's sexual politics while also reaffirming the fundamental insights of black queer theory. Equally critical are the ways that Bennett's novel puts substantial pressure on the anxious evocations of homosexuality that were voiced on occasion from within the movement. For instance, Amiri Baraka, the writer who Simmons argues was at the forefront of the nationalist consolidation of a homophobic nationalism, was also among the first to gesture toward the slippages inherent in these oppositions. The fact that Baraka has evoked the specter of the "faggot" in order to define nationalist subjectivity has been amply documented in his poetry and fiction, but the anxieties that this discourse produced were especially visible in his early drama.52 In "The Revolutionary Theatre," one of Baraka's first efforts to delineate a nationalist aesthetic, he frames black drama as an instrument to "flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln's face."53 By exposing the latent homosexuality and effeminacy concealed in the visage of this national monument, Baraka asserts the legitimacy of his own nationalist aesthetic. Or put another way, the "faggot" enables the feminization and negation of American nationalism as a means to validate black nationalism. Baraka's reference to flushing "murders" from Lincoln's face ties in directly with his related project to craft a drama that exposes how black men have been victimized by the American nation. His theatre makes its appeal by showing "victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims . . . and what they show must cause the blood to rush so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they will find themselves clenched, and even ready to die, at what the soul has been

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taught."54 Baraka writes a black nationalist aesthetic rooted in filial sympathy and shared victimhood in order to overcome a white nationalism that is compromised by its murderous intent and the "faggots" within it. Only two years earlier, however, Baraka had been far less rigid in his representation of the oppositions between nationalism and the homosexual. His 1964 play The Slave dramatizes the love triangle between a nationalist revolutionary named Walker Vessels, his white ex-wife, Grace, and her white husband, Easley. The core drama takes place as Walker and his fellow revolutionaries wage a full-on military assault against the state. As the story unfolds, the audience discovers that Walker's nationalism is itself an occasion for him to erase a past in which, like Baraka, he was embedded in the racially integrated world of the New York Bohemian. Once the revolution breaks out, Walker returns homeward to confront his past and in the process expresses a deep ambiguity about the radical path that he has undertaken. He prefigures the nationalist equation of whiteness and homosexuality when he refers to Easley as an "ignorant vomiting faggot professor" and Grace's "faggot husband."55 These crude efforts to degrade Easley serve to disavow both Walker's roots in the Bohemian world of aestheticism and his previous friendship with Easley. This is one reason that he slaps Easley and exclaims, "Bastard! A poem for your mother!"56 Which is to say that the play achieves its opposition to bourgeois aestheticism by staging an attack on Easley— "punking" the white male subject physically and aesthetically. Despite this general reiteration of nationalist binaries, Walker also expresses a profound nostalgia for his relationship with Easley. He pines for the days when he could "argue politics or literature, or boxing with you, dear Easley, with you," and he laments that his black comrades "are ignorant motherfuckers who have never read any book in their lives."57 One could accept Baraka's own retrospective account of Walker's ambivalence and read this moment as part of the character's status as a "victim." Which is to say that his ambivalence is also the thing that makes him the "Slave," the nationalist who is victimized by his own tragic inability to separate himself from the white culture that shackles him. Still, Walker's critique of his comrades and his love for Easley also exceeds Baraka's efforts to contain the play's political import. This lingering desire for Easley speaks to the ambivalence of nationalist dialectics more broadly and limns an unconscious inkling that revolution would not fully sever the black subject's relationship to whiteness or the white nation. In the earliest stages of Baraka's nationalist development, then, there was a fluidity that attended nationalist masculinity that his later work labored to repress. In this regard, Baraka's early drama hinted at the slippages and contradictions that Bennett's novel pursues with such ludic pleasure.

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Black Eros If Bennett and Major share a pronounced skepticism about the warrants of a national belonging codified through the play of sexualized nationalisms, the complementariness of their work persists as their novels probe more affirmative instantiations of eroticized nationalism. Following the logic of their nationalist counterparts, Eli Bolton and Joe Market both work against the strictures of white supremacy by exalting black heterosexual eroticism within the race as a defining feature of their nationalisms. Yet the novels in which the characters appear trade in the excesses of an eroticized racial belonging even as they finger the knots binding these ideologies politically and aesthetically. Such tensions are especially relevant in Eli's relationship to his black girlfriend Anita. Initially, it seems that his sexual relationship with her merely reiterates the opposition between war and Eros, for while in Vietnam Eli longs "to get back to my sweetpussy fox Anita! To hold her close to suck her long-nippled tits" (78). Once he returns stateside, however, this more general investment in her as a conduit for his self-making becomes more political in character. During one of the longest erotic passages in the novel, Eli painstakingly describes Anita's performance of fellatio. As he imagines it, the erotic act transforms Anita, a svelte bourgeois consumer, into a "strong big Black Woman, Mighty Nile, African energetic lips, the muscles in them quivering" (105). And later in the episode Eli proclaims her the "Black Mother of a deep wisdom, intrinsic in every fuse, every chromosome, every crevice of her epidermis, enormous in the internal cavities of her mouth, anus, the atoms of her urethra, the tissues of her every thought" (104). Eli's representation of his black American girlfriend as a corporal relay to his African essence is a revealing manifestation of what Calvin Hernton identified as "Black Eros." In Coming Together: Black Power White Hatred and Sexual Hangups (1971) Hernton employed the term to describe the mechanism by which hetersexual eroticism served as a national counter against a white supremacy that imposes "the sexual fears and pathologies of white racists on black subjects" (149). This model of "NATIONHOOD inevitably involves the search and struggle for self-love and togetherness between black men and black women" (149). He goes on to offer readers an instructive list of potential meanings for the new black sexuality: "Black Nationhood, black pride, black nationalism, black identity, black beauty, black survival, call it what you will, call it Black Eros" (154). In this view, Eli's investment in a racially coded Eros refers not only to the sexual attraction between men and women but also to the broader sense of renewed aesthetic appreciation for the bodies and cultural productions of black people. Commenting

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on the proliferation of such eroticism in poetry, Hernton concludes, "It is literally impossible to keep up with the quantity of material being written in this vein—all over the country, east, west, south and north, it is being poured out over the deep recesses of hurt, loneliness and the overlong deprivation of self esteem on the part of black men and women" (155). Black Eros was to serve both as a therapeutic balm for the wounded psyches of black subjects and as an essential means for consolidating national belonging. The speaker of Everett Hoagland's 1970 poem "The Anti-Semanticist" succinctly affirms Hernton's assessment of heterosexual Eros when he proclaims to his female lover, "[I] t matters only that there is / black power / in your loving."58 Similarly, in Carolyn Rodgers's poem "Love—the Beginning and the End" the speaker instructs the "Black Man" to "move into a Woman, Black Man move / her / us, rush into her / scatter your seeds, plant your dreams in her / and you / Black Woman / open open / your self, open & bare your / softest fear, your nakedest secret / Black People open . . . the last aspect is Love is Revolution."59 Straddling the line between agape and Eros, Black Power advocates forged a grid of ideological meaning in which readers could imagine the intimacy of Eli and Anita building the temples of national solidarity. One can certainly see the sexual ideologies of nationalism operative in Eli's relationship with Anita, but she is also a peculiar partner for his journey into Black Eros. For instance, Eli claims that she "would not discuss civil rights nor Black Power nor riots. The realities in the world around us. She absolutely refused to become engaged in any kind of discussion remotely related" (71). Given her political indifference, her lack of "black anger,'" and her predilection for consumption, Anita is an unlikely conduit for Eli's entrance into Black Eros (69-70). The juxtaposition of Anita as both black essence and consumer reconfigures Eli's erotic emancipation as an inadequate political prosthesis. Eli himself points out the fact that Anita "was not a black woman who emphasized the blackness of her beauty" (70). Only within the boundaries of Eli's ideologically coded narration does he associate Anita with an essential blackness. Providing no lasting form of private or political solidarity between him and Anita, the rhetorical evocation of Black Eros merely serves Eli's ephemeral desire to experience his racial difference. Whereas nationalists imagined that Black Eros would consolidate the movement's union between black men and women, Eli's reference to this ideology merely consolidates his narcissistic capacity to remain "centered in all the invisible 'constructs' of myself' (103). The excesses of Eli's rhetoric in describing his encounter with Anita further suspend the effects of Black Eros as a political ideology. Eli's baroque verbal play threatens to collapse into a comic parody of Black Eros. For instance, offering readers more than their fill of phallocentric invention, he claims, "[I]t is like a wet electric meat god cabling magic

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into her, screwing the tunnel of us close, stopping up the ends, to make us one rope, into a mavoid or in Swahili tupu!" (109). While Eli describes a scenario in which his subjective "void" is filled through his achievement of an Africanized, phallic self, incongruous metaphors such as "electric meat god" underscore the artificiality of his invention. And his recourse to Swahili—a language that he only evokes in this ideological coding of Eros—further accents the constructedness of his nationalist identity. Eli's linguistic effusiveness does not produce the wholeness that he longs for but rather, through its discontinuous relationship to his everyday life and its juxtaposition of incongruous categories, calls attention to the enormity of the void he seeks to fill. By presenting Black Eros as an ideology that never quite fulfills Eli's pursuit of plenitude, Ail-Night Visitors revises a position that Major adopted in an essay published in the same year as the novel. When Eli eroticizes Anita by referencing her "big Lil-Armstrong-jazz-days eyes" he culls from the representation of the actual Lil Armstrong that Major created in his essay "The Tender Wrinkle between Her Eyebrows" (98). Published as an homage to the innovative early jazz pianist and former wife of Louis Armstrong, Major's essay describes his meeting with her in Chicago during the late sixties. Far more than a purely journalistic exercise, the piece presents Armstrong as a symbol of a black community united through its shared cultural heritage. In a description of Hardin Armstrong playing the piano at a house party, Major presents her as a conduit for his experience of a black national belonging based in a common culture. He characterizes the moment as "one of the true intimate, good experiences of my life."60 As Lil plays the piano she "came to life, filled the apartment, she filled me with her beautiful rhythm, getting to her thing. There was in her voice the dark joy of our people, the happy moments of black sound" (8). Through the metaphor of penetration Major evokes both an erotic act and his own transformation as a subject. His receding of the female subject as a phallus that "fills him" presents black cultural belonging as fundamentally masculine and thereby affirms his ties to the phallocentrism of the movement. Major's eroticization of black culture through the figure of Lil Hardin Armstrong is even more revealing as the passage develops. Armstrong sings a song about a black woman in the 1920s who speaks to "a white man, bartering over a price for sex with herself, so she could feed her real man, her black man" (8). Major takes in "the ultimate beauty of it all" and is "left swimming in my own tides of self, my own sense of black history" (8).Just as Eli Bolton references Anita to conjure his ecstatic fantasy of communal belonging, so Major references Armstrong in order to construct himself as a part of a black collective. However, it is the potential for masculinist solipsism and the exploitation of black women inherent in this logic that the novel emphasizes. The

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novel's comic treatment of Black Eros rewrites not only the movement's sexualized nationalism but also Major's own investment in a nationalist Eros rooted in a shared cultural heritage. This pursuit of personal and communal liberation through Black Eros is no less fraught for Joe Market and his wife, Odessa. She and Joe marry some five years before his tour of duty in Vietnam begins in 1968. The pair often quarrel because of Joe's longing to sire a male heir and her anxiety about bearing children in the turbulent sixties. She pleads, "They killing colored people all over this country, Joe. They hanging them, and shooting them, and killing them with bombs, and running over them with cars. I don't want them things to happen to no child of mine, Joe" (97). Recalling his own father's rhetoric, Joe's rejoinder is framed as a negation of a whole legacy of white supremacist violence: "'Nobody's going to lynch a child of mine,' he said remembering that his own grandfather had been lynched" (97). Joe's position holds sway, and when Odessa becomes pregnant he "felt like crying. It was spring. The trees were budding. And so was Odessa. What a pity that America wasn't a large and beautiful black woman, budding all the time" (101). His tears are as much an expression of love for the nation that might be propagated through the eroticized black female body as it is a lamentation for an inadequate American nationalism. The child provides another occasion for Joe to produce his nationalism through a phallocentric self-regard. Certainly, the signal indicator of this development is the fact that Joe names his son Christopher in tribute to his penis and Columbus, America's national progenitor. Just before Joe returns from Vietnam to meet his newborn son, he engages in a bout of autoeroticism that captures the relations between white and black nationalisms. The scene takes place just after Joe has killed a Vietcong in combat. He "forced his mind onto the subject of Odessa, because he didn't like his dick getting hard while he had been thinking about death. Man he wanted to wallow down in Odessa's black thighs now, to guide her lips down to his throbbing dick, to have her drink his come. . . . [T]hen he reached down and grabbed Christopher around the head and neck and helped him fuck his fist while he prayed inside his own head to somebody for that other Christopher that was growing inside Odessa's belly" (126-27). The eroticism in Joe's nationalist ideal is so narcissistic that the object of its cathexis and the end product of its desire are but extensions of the speculary phallus. In this regard, Joe's Black Eros reproduces the totalizing narcissism that he sees as the primary failing of his father's religion. The defining paradox of Joe's fantasy, then, is that while he hopes to do unto his son "none of the wrong that my father did to me," his investment in a phallocentric eroticism does precisely that (127). At its most extreme, this narcissism manifests itself in Joe's destructive conflation of his son with the phallus that he perceives as always in danger.

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After he returns from Vietnam, he is plagued by castration anxieties to such an extent that, upon seeing Christopher, Joe thinks, "[H]e'd given them a son for somebody to cut his balls out man now he understood why he didn't like the baby in the first place he was going to cover its head and up now hide it now so nobody not even Odessa could know it had been born come with the scissors knives" (142). As the use of syntax uninterrupted by punctuation suggests, the collapse of phallus and child is total. Joe conceals Christopher precisely because the baby's vulnerability demonstrates the inadequacy of the phallus in promoting emancipation. And in his effort to disguise this fragility Joe eventually suffocates Christopher. If Christopher is the product of Black Eros, then Joe's commitment to preserving the fiction of continuity and authority that he attaches to the phallus shatters this very mode of emancipation. The masculine narcissism that attends Black Eros smothers its own prospect for regeneration. Whether in the grim tragedy of Bennett's narrative or the comic excesses of Major's, black eroticism, the exaltation of the phallus ushers in little that can be construed as political efficacy. These works occupy the gaps between claims about eroticism and political outcomes. From this vantage point, then, Black Eros cannot be defined as a consolidation of racial feeling, but instead must be viewed as a part of a protracted contestation over the terms that define how community is imagined.

After Sexual Liberation In confounding the terms in which nationalist identity was constituted, neither Major nor Bennett were content with a straightforward negation of black nationalist strategies. If Major's critical response to the sexual politics of Black Power in All-Night Visitors set the terms for his breach with the movement, the novel also gestures toward an alternate political economy. After tracing Eli's journey from Chicago to Vietnam and to Mexico, the novel closes in New York. Penniless and jobless, Eli seems to have exhausted his investment in the ideology of Eros. In the novel's final chapter he moves in with a young white woman named Eunice who is also the kept woman of her boss. Eli's erotic relationship with her finally dissolves when Eunice asks him to pose with her in nude pictures to be taken by her boss. Upon hearing her proposition, he feels "the vivid red light horror of the carnival-like request" (198). What begins as a quest for a form of erotic self-fashioning that would help to mend Eli's fragmented selfhood devolves into pornography. While Eli's relationship with Eunice signals the exhaustion of his investment in Eros, the novel presents an alternate political activism constrained by neither racial nor sexual ideology. When living in a New York tenement, Eli is disturbed to find that his neighbors, a Puerto Rican woman and her children, have been

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forced out of their apartment by her abusive husband. Spying the homeless family through his peephole, Eli claims he "realized that I could not rationalize my way out of my human responsibility to those ageless sounds of pain that were expropriating this mother from a blemished but necessary social security" (200). He goes on to assert, '7/