Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture (review)

Interracial coupling has been a source of anxiety in American culture for a long time. Popular discourse on interraciality pays particular attention to heterosexual pairings of black males with white females. Meanwhile, the myth of white womanhood has sanctified white female bodies to legitimate violence against or to estrange ignoble black male bodies. Popular film and media have also often shaped or given credence to the public imagination, representing the trope of interraciality in hyperbolic works such as D.W. Griffith's infamous The Birth of a Nation (1915) and in progressive works such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). More recently, the news media have made much of President Barack Obama's biracial ethnicity to distance and reify his blackness. Few scholarly works have attempted to make sense of black-white coupling apart from its disreputable representation, and even fewer (if any) scholarly works have attempted to analyze a nonstraight black-white coupling.

Offering one of the first sustained critical analyses of the trope of interraciality within the social practices of race, gender, desire, and nationalism, Stefanie K. Dunning's first book, Queer in Black and White, thinks through such arrangements with black and white bodies that exhibit queer (contrastraight) desire. Dunning's work roots itself in the concern that mainstream black discourses have marginalized black queers by conflating their couplings with white partners with a desire to be white. To her, nothing is further from the truth, as an examination of some of the most important texts of the black gay and lesbian canon illustrates. Eschewing against-the-grain readings, Dunning approaches only unambiguous representations of interraciality in such seminal black texts as Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (analyzed in the introduction), Me'Shell NdegéOcello's Plantation Lullabies (chapter 1), James Baldwin's Another Country (chapter 2), Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her (chapter 3), and Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (chapter 4). With appreciable attention to rhetorical devices and language usage, Dunning rigorously dissects these case studies to claim provocatively that interraciality is a façade that conservatively reiterates the specificity of the black partner's blackness. This conclusion refutes the notion that queer identity symbolically attains white identity.

The concept of black nationalism, spawned by influential Black Power leaders of the 1960s like Amiri Baraka, becomes the ideology with which and against which discourses of black queer interraciality operate. Dunning roots homophobia deeply within the black nationalist identity, stating specifically that it motivates (negative) musical, visual, and literary representations of interracial, same-sex desire. Dunning elaborates how black queer counterdiscursive representations of interraciality seek to destabilize monolithic blackness. Black queer artists then reconstruct it in variable ways. This reconstruction takes place through the trope of the "miscegephor," a portmanteau coined by Dunning to describe how "miscegenation," as a subversion of the homogenous practices of socially constructed raced coupling, exists as a metaphor—in thought and, as she opines, not in deed (p. 9). This particular spin reminds scholars where race resides first and foremost: within the mind.

In chapter 1, Dunning discusses the discursive strategies of the lyrics and visual images that embellish Plantation Lullabies (1993), the debut album of Me'Shell NdegéOcello (the first out hip-hop artist). Dunning's close readings of the songs and images of Plantation Lullabies reveal the contradictory fashion by which NdegéOcello engages black nationalist (hetero) sexual politics and also enables a bisexual reading.

In chapter 2, Dunning illuminates black nationalism's emphasis on reproduction (of subsequent generations of blackness and maleness), which leads to the demonization of interracial desire and queerness. Dunning subversively reads Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, which does "not quite [succeed] at asserting itself and the black community as straight" (p. 47). Meticulously analyzing Cleaver, Dunning concludes that his homophobic diatribe against fellow black author James Baldwin belies his desire for the influential author and concomitantly suggests the fundamentally homosocial bonds of black nationalism. Dunning...