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

1 “Ironic Soil”: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism

1 “Ironic Soil” Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalisms The fact of the matter is that major nationalist theoreticians have generally been exceedingly humanistic . . . In fact, a strong tendency to reach beyond themselves toward union with mankind has been a marked characteristic of most nationalist theoreticians from David Walker to Paul Robeson. The nationalists’ concern for their fellow man should be kept in mind in order to avoid doing violence to the meaning of historic black nationalism. —Sterling Stuckey I worry at this particular moment in our history where a lot of the gains that were brought about, to a certain extent, by some of the more positive attributes of nationalism are really being threatened. As much as I would like to eliminate the radically exclusionary attitudes of certain forms of black nationalism, I don’t want to get rid of Affirmative Action and I really feel strongly about making these distinctions. —Coco Fusco I n “It’s Raining Men: Notes on the Million Man March,” Robert Reid-Pharr eloquently describes the difficulty of relating black nationalist discourse to homosexuality. This difficulty is founded on the assumption that blackness and homosexuality are mutually exclusive, that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are the nation’s antagonists .1 This notion that blackness and heterosexuality are natural pairs and that “authentic” blackness cannot contain or does not include 1DUNNING_pages.indd 23 3/13/09 11:03:36 AM 24 Queer in Black and White queer ­ identifications as well is one that has been aptly and frequently deconstructed and commented on by critics such as Phillip Brian Harper, Audre Lorde, Wahneema Lubiano, Dwight McBride, Rhonda M. Williams, E. Patrick Johnson, Kendall Thomas, and others.2 ReidPharr identifies the blatant homophobia embodied in the rhetoric of the Million Man March, noting that “if the real message of the march was that it is going to take a heroic black masculinity to restore order to our various communities, especially poor and working-class communities , then it follows that black gay men are irrelevant, or even dangerous, to that project.”3 Reid-Pharr aptly distinguishes the politics of the “nation” (and here, the black nation largely writ could be said to have been collapsed under the sign of the “Nation” of Islam since Louis Farrakhan was the instigator of the march) as embodied by the march as black, as heterosexual, and as exclusive of women. Like the aforementioned critiques of black nationalism, which is invested in a disciplining and policing of sexuality and gender, Reid-Pharr identifies the politics of the march as bound to the same homophobic and sexist logic that has often been an undeniable aspect of black nationalism. Reid-Pharr notes, “For, if the definition of blackness hinges on heterosexuality, then either blackness and homosexuality are incommensurable (and black gays are not really black) or the notion of blackness is untenable, as witnessed by the large numbers of black gay men.”4 Of course, as Reid-Pharr goes on to note immediately after this passage , contemporary gay and lesbian thought makes the previous quoted possibility an impossibility. Advancing the notion that essentialist notions of blackness exclude the possibility of homosexuality is, I am attempting to point out here, a necessarily much discussed aspect of the study of race and sexuality. However, what I seek to examine is the way a critique of black nationalism does not necessarily move one past the nationalist moment. Indeed, what I discuss herein is a queering of black nationalism that stretches and bends the limits of nationalism so that it can include those identities and subjects it views as outlaw. I begin with the invocation of Reid-Pharr’s essay because though he thoroughly and ably unpacks the problematic aspects of the Million Man March’s rhetoric, he ends by noting, “Here, then, despite the regressive racial and gender politics that framed the Million Man March, there were countless improvisational moments of transcendence.”5 Reid-Pharr’s consideration of the Million Man March, then, is not at all a dismissal 1DUNNING_pages.indd 24 3/13/09 11:03:37 AM “Ironic Soil” 25 of the event based on its predictably anachronistic political implications . Rather, Reid-Pharr’s essay participates in an emerging trend at queer sites that not only calls black nationalism’s heterosexism into question, but also, and perhaps most importantly, seeks to invade it, to subvert it and deconstruct the logic of nationalism by occupying its...