-
Preface
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface I began by remembering the most easily forgotten thing: truth telling is not simple. It is not like the Norman Rockwell painting in which a ruggedly handsome white man, whose plaid collar is literally blue, speaks to the town meeting at his white clapboard church, while other white men, wearing ties, listen in admiration. Truth telling isn’t like that. Truth’s speakers don’t often radiate handsome honesty. They are disconcerting and diverse rather than comfortably familiar. They are rarely received with admiring attention. And what they have to say can seem beyond hearing—or bearing. —Mark D. Jordan, Telling Truths in Church Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality has been in the making for some time now. Indeed, the essays contained here span more than a decade. It is not a conventional book; it willfully transgresses genres. At turns academic, journalistic, and autobiographical, the book testifies to the fact that it takes a multiplicity of genres—sometimes working together in the same essay—to effectively render the truth of our lives. This is certainly the case if you believe, as I do, that truth telling is never simple or easy. Part I of this book advances a variety of uses to which the serious analysis of race and gender together might be put. The first essay in this section ruminates on why and how the discipline of African American studies has for so long excluded any considerable focus on sexuality. It also goes far toward challenging the discipline for the incomplete and monolithic picture of the African American community that it has for so long projected and protected. The second essay in this section takes a look at the clothier and its advertising campaign to examine what it has successfully packaged and marketed— a rarified form of elite whiteness that depends upon the racist thinking and 1 logic of its consumers for its very success. And the final essay takes the analysis from the prior essay and extends it to a reading of the place and functions of race as the salient variable in the gay marketplace of desire. Taken together with the preface and the introduction, the chapters in the opening section of this book represent an attempt to speak a version of the truth of black gay male subjectivity, a version of the truth of African American studies, and a version of the truth of the black community. Part II shifts from the broadly cultural to the political. The occasional essays in this section allow for an analysis of race and sexuality in broad terms. It is also a commentary about where both my own thinking and the thinking of the emergent field of black queer/gay and lesbian studies find themselves at present. That is, we think primarily through the lens of race, with sexuality contributing only partly to our perspective that makes the critical difference in what we, on occasion, bring to the discussion. This book is primarily and explicitly about pushing the boundaries of what we call the discipline (and I do call it a discipline and not a field) of African American or black studies. My interventions and investments in black queer studies to date have been about transforming African American studies. For me, African American studies represents the site and the intellectual terrain on which I am most interested in doing this work of thinking about race and sexuality. I realize that the work I do is related to, indebted to, and should have an impact on queer studies as well. But such is not the fuel that drives my thinking or my intellectual and political investments. I have often thought that queer theory has been late to come to terms with much of its own racial biases. Very able and illuminating critiques to that effect have been and continue to be made by scholars and commentators in many quarters. My own investments, however, as I understand them, are with the transformation of the discipline of African American studies as an institutional formation and as a form of analysis that takes seriously the questions, complications, and richness that serious ruminations on sexuality—in concert with race, gender, and class—bring to the table of analyzing, critiquing, PREFACE 2 [18.212.87.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:03 GMT) and recording black life, history, cultural production, and political practices. In the provocative words of Essex Hemphill: It is not enough to tell us that...