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

Stefanie K. Dunning’s exploration of interraciality offers a nuanced framework with which to reconsider black queer texts. By analyzing how texts embrace or reject interracial, same-sex desire, Queer in Black and White reveals “the work that the interracial performs” (5). Dunning’s study refutes the black nationalist notion that “queer identity is not a black thing” by demonstrating that interraciality in black queer texts does not affirm or privilege whiteness but “reframe[s] and solidif[ies] blackness” (7). “The use of miscegenation as a metaphor, which stresses one’s racial position rather than undermining it,” Dunning writes, “is one important aspect of black signifying on the interracial site” (12). Dunning does not simply draw parallels between tropes of miscegenation common to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century African American literature and the prevalence of interraciality in contemporary black queer texts. Rather, she fortifies black queer texts’ position in the African American literary tradition, as their coupling of interraciality and same-sex desire is a refiguration of symbolic miscegenation. While the trope of interraciality redefines blackness in queer texts, it also confirms that black queer subjectivity is always already a black thing.

Queer in Black and White contributes to scholarship in queer studies, African American studies, and cultural studies with a critique of heterosexist hegemonic discourses on blackness. In each chapter, Dunning engages contemporary African American culture. For example, one chapter begins with a juxtaposition of Eddie Murphy’s claim to heterosexuality as a father and husband—despite his solicitation of a transsexual prostitute—with black nationalist ideologies. Another chapter ends with a discussion of Deep Dickollective, whose rap music critiques racism while affirming black queer identity. In a third chapter, Dunning makes a speculative turn from Missy Elliot’s song “She’s a Bitch” to a “queered double invocation” of the term butch (85). Significantly, Dunning claims Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied (1989) as a foundational text for revealing the politics of interraciality. She points out the tensions between the film’s context of intraracial, same-sex love as “THE revolutionary act” (3) and its subtext of Riggs’s real-life relationship with his white partner. Ultimately, Queer in Black and White examines the counter-discourses of interraciality through an analysis of four queer textual “firsts”: Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s album Plantation Lullabies (1993), James Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1962), Ann Allen Shockley’s novel Loving Her (1974), and Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996).

In Chapter One, “‘Ironic Soil’: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism,” Dunning examines NdegéOcello’s attempts to “remake, renegotiate, and revamp nationalism” through her musical aesthetic (25). Dunning argues that Plantation Lullabies expresses the Afrocentricity of black nationalism—which is inherently male—while simultaneously undermining it with gender-neutral lyrics and accompanying photographs of NdegéOcello in a masculine suit. Although NdegéOcello invokes Eldridge Cleaver, soul music, and male/female paradigms, Dunning convincingly contends that her bisexual politics and butch aesthetic enable her to preserve the black love of nationalism even as she challenges its masculinist discourse by affirming that she is hip-hop—without “alternative” or “queer” qualifiers.

In Chapter Two, “‘No Tender Mercy’: Same-Sex Desire, Interraciality, and the Black Nation,” Dunning asserts that Cleaver’s critique of Baldwin in Soul on Ice (1968) is not only based on black nationalism’s investment in reproductive heterosexuality, but also rooted in Cleaver’s rejection of Baldwin’s “interracial homosexuality” (51). Dunning suggests that given his admiration of Baldwin’s writing productivity, Cleaver’s repudiation of him “thinly veils his deep identification with Baldwin and his characters” (60). Thus, homosocial desire undergirds Cleaver’s text, just as black nationalism is the subtext of Baldwin’s Another Country. Despite this nationalist subtext, the novel’s conclusion, Dunning surmises, “is not an ending that disavows black masculinity, but instead one that decenters it as the defining trope...