Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual (review)

The postethnic landscape should be less hazardous after the manufactured obstacles of ethnicity have been dismantled and cleared away, and yet we still find all of those categories stubbornly lying around. As long as they remain, theories of postethnicity do not move beyond ethnic identity so much as they navigate us through a cosmopolitan landscape to particular ethnic locales. More often than not, the vehicle of postethnicity is "choice." Turning ethnic ascription into what David Hollinger calls "affiliation by revocable consent" has the benefit of utilizing ethnic categories without succumbing to the parochialism—or the essentialism—that would give those categories unseemly significance.¹ While many studies balance choice with determinism—consent with descent (for Werner Sollors) or routes with roots (for Paul Gilroy)—Robert Reid-Pharr's Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual stresses choice as the primary corollary to the premise that "black subjectivity is a radically undecided concept" (122). Reid-Pharr argues that blackness as a given and inevitable category forces the black American individual into a political dead end where agency is not only vacated but actually excused by the myth sustaining that category: primitive African "innocence." That is, the idea of blackness has been used to encourage black individuals to be anti-modern simply by being ante-modern. Reid-Pharr's trenchant point is that "racial distinction continues to be so fixed an entity within American culture precisely because we like it that way"—because the cage of racial designation is also the protective shell in which "we resign ourselves to self-imposed powerlessness" and justify our collective inaction (8). The ties that bind are the ties that exonerate.

Reid-Pharr's position differs from many of the well-known left critiques of identity politics. While critics such as Walter Benn Michaels and Kenneth Warren claim that our commitment to ethnic difference encourages us to romanticize or ignore the socioeconomic inequality reinforcing those differences, Reid-Pharr contends that the political fallout of identity politics is not misplaced goals but the complete absence of goals. He engages this problem by summoning queer black perspectives to unsettle static black perspectives. Reid-Pharr's central argument is that homosexual desire is an expression of "individualism and peculiarity" (37) powerful enough to destabilize the tradition that replaces individual agency with a monolithic black American identity. Homosexuality is no longer just a disciplinary hammer with which to nail down racial and social differences. It is also the force that disassembles those differences for the sake of unfettered individuality.

The first section of Once You Go Black focuses on Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin as intellectuals that revive individuality via figures of homosexual desire in their fiction. Reid-Pharr examines their late (and often overlooked) novels: Wright's The Long Dream (1958), Ellison's posthumously published Juneteenth (1999), and Baldwin's Just above My Head (1979). This section integrates textual details with keen biographical readings that demonstrate how the challenges specific to postwar black public intellectuals often involved questions of sexual identification. Glimpsing Wright through The Long Dream refreshingly alters the indelible image of him we see through the lens of Native Son and Black Boy. Reid-Pharr marks Wright's peculiarity as the "funny intellectual," which is a "corollary and counterpart to the notion of the queer intellectual" in that the funny precedes the queer (39). Referring to a moment when Margaret Walker catches Wright in a tryst with another man, which Wright passes off as childish fun in a poem he later sent to Walker, Reid-Pharr remarks,

Part of Wright's genius was his ability to map narratives of intellectual celebrity in such a way that the presumably 'queer' aspects of his personality, those many parts of his persona that encroached upon 'sexual abnormality,' were channeled into familiar narratives of youthful experimentation.

(39)

He then locates a figure for this aspect of Wright's intellectualism in the character Aggie in The Long...