Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (review)

One of the explicit goals of the African American and Asian American cultural nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s was to define an "authentic" ethnic subject who could stand tall in the face of white racist oppression. The writers working within these movements invariably conceived of this resistant subject as masculine, articulate, virile, militant, and heterosexual. Homophobia structured the language and rhetoric they used to construct this idealized subject and the meaning of ethnic experience. While this kind of position has disappeared in current critical discourse (and was effectively dismantled by feminist critics), the fact remains that some of the most canonical authors of these two literary traditions saw themselves and their work as part of this masculinist project. For critics writing in the early twenty-first century, it is sometimes easier to set aside the expressions of sexism, homophobia, and violence they encounter in these works than to engage with them.

Daniel Y. Kim is one critic who refuses to look the other way. The homophobia of two canonical figures—Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin—takes center stage in Kim's study, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity. Focusing on a wide range of both Ellison and Chin's writings (including fiction, drama, essays, and interviews), Writing Manhood is one of many books that promises an analysis of "race, class, gender, and sexuality," but it is one of the few that delivers on that promise, giving equal analytical weight to all of those identity markers. Kim uses a Freudian approach to investigate the homophobia that structures the anti-racist agendas of Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. He argues convincingly that for these writers, "erotic desire [is] an essential motive [ . . . ] for all social interactions" (46), as well as an important component of the homophobia they express and the homosocial bonds that they seek (177). Kim examines how "anti-racist cultural politics comes to articulate itself with and against homophobia" (xxii). This homophobia has its roots in the way that Ellison and Chin conceive of the psychic injuries that racism causes. Both authors believe that racism feminizes men of color, robbing them of the rightful "patriarchal prerogatives" (17) that white men enjoy. The two authors thus share a "symbolic shorthand that makes [ . . . ] homosexuality an apt symbol for white racism" (237); more alarmingly, such an equation renders the homosexual man of color a self-hating assimilationist whose sexual orientation is the result of his internalization of the white racist gaze. A crucial aspect of Kim's analysis focuses on Ellison and Chin's attempt to recover a "vernacular masculinity" untainted by racism's emasculating gaze. This vernacular subject is linked to a working-class masculinity and characterized by his linguistic agility, or "his capacity to repeat parodically and subversively the languages that constitute the center" (38). Kim does not use the vernacular here to refer to a set of linguistic conventions but rather to the "signifying intent" of the authors. Literary acts enable these authors to forge homosocial and even interracial bonds that move beyond racism. What is particularly effective and satisfying about Writing Manhood is its meticulous explication (and therefore demystification) of homophobic discourse that parades itself as anti-racist critique. Although this is not his explicit intention, Kim's precise and thorough analysis of homophobic rhetoric dismantles the pretensions of its practitioners more effectively than a direct rebuttal could.

Although the subtitle of Kim's book would suggest a narrow focus, Writing Masculinity immerses the reader in a wide range of texts and cultural histories. Two chapters each are devoted to Ellison and Chin, but within these Kim has plenty to say about the works of Richard Wright, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, Franz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Robert Park, Caryl Philips, R. Zamora Linmark, and Sax Rohmer (author of The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu [1913]). Kim allies...