Queering the African American Essay

Black Gay Man: Essays. Robert Reid-Pharr. New York: New York University Press, 2001. xviii + 195 pp.

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations. Phillip Brian Harper. New York: New York University Press, 1999. xvii + 189 pp.

At the beginning of his essay "Of Experience," Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay form, writes: "There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experience."¹ This epigram perhaps best explains Montaigne's own desire to forge the genre of the essay, whose name derives from the French verb meaning to make an attempt. Montaigne understood that knowledge, especially knowledge about the human being, however seemingly natural an object of human desire, is impossibly unstable, relative, illusory, and unsystematic. The best he could do was to make repeated efforts to stabilize knowledge by plumbing his own experience, and that of others, in brief spurts of intensely introspective and extroverted writing, allowing reason to take him as far as it could before it invariably failed, falling into anecdote, analogy, example, and incidence. As an embattled humanist, Montaigne was unsure to what extent any rational system could be fashioned to map humanity, even as he believed in generalizing ironically from the diverse experiences of particular situations and individuals.

The personal essay form has held an honored place in African American writing since at least the 1903 publication of The Souls of Black Folk, toward the beginning of which W. E. B. DuBois proffers the highly loaded "unasked question" indirectly put to every black person who finds herself or himself in the midst of whites: "How does it feel to be a problem?"² Beneath this unasked question, another even more repressed one constantly erupts between the lines of DuBois's prose: How does it feel to be a sexual problem? Characterizing the race as stamped by "the red stain of bastardy," DuBois laments, "But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair" (9). Thus perverse sexuality as a touchstone of racial identity haunts the African American personal essay from the outset. Given their long firsthand experience with reason's racial codicils, exclusions, and brutalities, African Americans have had good reason to doubt the exaggerated claims made through and on behalf of rationality since the European Enlightenment. Needing to build knowledge and generalize about the desires of the racial group as proper human subjects, and possessing little intellectual capital beyond the certainty of their own experience of being fully human, African American writers have turned devotedly to the personal essay as a form especially suited to this task. "Since black writing came of age in this country in the 1920s," Gerald Early suggests, "the essay seems to be the informing genre behind it. . . . black essays or essay collections have had generally as large, and in some cases an even larger impact on American life and letters than the most successful black novels."³ Wanting to bind the individual to humanity while enhancing the capacity of readers to grasp black individuation, wanting to obligate the individual to the racial group while resisting the equation of the two, African American writers have fashioned a long essay tradition of testifying to the texture and heft of cultural identity by fusing personal experience to polemics, philosophy, politics, and poetry.

With their essay collections Robert Reid-Pharr and Phillip Brian Harper powerfully extend and elaborate inquiries into multiplex identification famously attempted by the likes of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Joseph Beam. While judiciously informed by "high" academic theory—especially race, gender, and queer theory—Reid-Pharr and Harper resist the tendency to elevate theory itself to the superior status of sole vehicle and arbiter of...