A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference (review)

Jeffrey Allen Tucker's analysis of the writings of Samuel R. Delany reminds us that black identity politics is a narrative constructed to critique, resist, and transform the essentialized and subordinated blackness constructed by the essentialized whiteness of western modernist hegemony. According to Tucker, Delany's Hugo Award-winning memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), "demonstrates not only the constructedness of identity but also what Robert Reid-Pharr calls 'the essentially permeable and thus impure nature of all American identities'" (3). The discourse of black identity politics emerged out of the social movement for racial justice and human rights. Historically, the movement for racial justice in the United States has marginalized black homosexuals as an act of image control and conformity within the conventions of American heterosexist masculinity.

The transformative power of identity politics—to move in-between grand narratives as well as beyond them—thus became bracketed within the politics of race. In order to give moral and political legitimacy to the movement of racial uplift, this "bracketing" strategically excluded gay male identity, choosing rather to focus on the necessity to critique and resist the dominant hegemonic discourse of white supremacy. Tucker's analysis of Delany's writings suggests that the discourse of critique and resistance of early black identity politics merely substituted one (Eurocentric, sexualized) essentialized blackness for another. The antirace discourse of Black social movements challenged Eurocentric notions of race and critiqued prevailing notions of white (heterosexual) masculinity, which had at once sexualized and emasculated black men, but did not, in the end, challenge either the partriarchal or the heterocentric leanings of hegemonic masculinity. Black identity politics of the Civil Rights Era, as today, was dominated by an image controlling black officiati and the worldview of religious fundamentalism. There is no more room for Delany's fluid, black gay identity discourse today within "official" black identity politics than there was in the Western hegemonic discourse that it historically critiqued and resisted. This is how Tucker challenges prevailing critiques of Delany as being "anti identity politics." Tucker asserts that Delany's writing offers up multiple identities that are also black. As Delany himself notes:

I am black. Therefore what I do is part of the definition, the reality, the evidence of blackness. [. . .I]f you're interested in the behavior of redheads, and you look at three and think you see one pattern, then you look at a fourth and see something that for some reason strikes you as different, you don't then decide that this person despite the color of his hair isn't really red-haired—not if you and yours have laid down for a hundred years the legal, social and practical codes by which you decide what hair is red and what hair isn't, and have inflicted untold deprivations, genocide and humiliations on those who have been so labeled by that code.

(qtd. in Tucker 13)

Tucker prefers to see Delany's identity as "at once multiple and locatable" (3). As Tucker points out, Delany's quote above suggests a degree of race consciousness and awareness of the history and politics attached to race in America (14). Like Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Delany is an antirace humanist. However, the antirace humanism of the nineteenth and twentieth century stays safely within the boundaries of heterocentrism. As a black gay-male science fiction writer who seeks to recover the social and sexual voices between the contesting master narratives of race, Delany removes the brackets around the transformative possibilities of black identity politics. In so doing, Delany is a part of and apart from this site of struggle. Jeffrey Allen Tucker's A Sense of Wonder is an honest discussion of the contradictions and limitations of black social movements around the question of sexuality. Tucker's lengthy analysis of the writings of Samuel R. Delany and the question of racial authenticity is an...