An Undecided Blackness

Robert Reid-Pharr's Once You Go Black invites readers to move narrations of black history and culture from a concern with oppression and limits to a focus on freedom and agency. "What would happen," Reid-Pharr asks, "what worlds would collide, if students of American history and culture were to take seriously the idea that we all possess agency and indeed choice?" (3). To answer this critical inquiry, he performs close readings of texts by intellectuals from Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to Huey P. Newton and Melvin Van Peebles. With each unfolding narrative, he warns against the use of blackness as an always already decided category, but rather affirms identity as always in process, subject to choices and change. It is with this impulse and desire that Reid-Pharr travels as an "existential Negro" throughout Once You Go Black—willing to live and think outside his body—unpacking specific literary moments where black subjects may use the "outsider" positionality in ways they choose, rather than in some predestined fashion. Indeed, such a perspective dangerously refreshes blackness—enjoying its promises within a literary context—while potentially underemphasizing the everyday material rem(a)inders and realities that can limit agency in black life.

Once You Go Black represents a logical move after Reid-Pharr's previous book, Black Gay Man: Essays. As a graduate student, I recall reading the provocative opening scene where Reid-Pharr expressed his concerns about the book's title: "Every time I hear the designation [black gay man], I feel almost as if I am somehow denying a basic reality of my intellectual temperament."¹Once You Go Black attempts to situate Reid-Pharr's desire for his intellectual and lived experience within literature. Once You Go Black does not make the mistake of trying to force "black," "gay," or "man" to fit some decisive meaning. Rather, he is engaged in the critical project of unveiling the complexities of identities by locating agency and choice within literature and life. Through this approach, Reid-Pharr examines how literary (mis)representations of blacks led many intellectuals to sanitize blackness—while others would choose more radical and nonnormative forms of representation. Indeed, this is most evident as the book gracefully and remarkably moves between literary criticism, self-reflection, and theoretical experimentation.

Once You Go Black is separated into two sections. In the first, "Going Black," Reid-Pharr examines three great intellectuals: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. He outlines how these writers "break open" the literary trap of deeming blackness to be innocent and primitive. Reid-Pharr's close readings illuminate the often veiled brilliance and nuance in what may be understood as "canonical" black literary works. In "Alas Poor Jimmy," he engages the works of Baldwin and illustrates how they move choice from "the simple freedom to choose what acts one might perform" to "how one might imagine that body." Here, he provides the reader with an opportunity to understand black literary production as a "process of choosing and re-choosing" (113). In the second section, "Coming Back," Reid-Pharr unravels the complicated ways that some black intellectuals respond to the erosion of innocence and profundity as a politics of representing and performing blackness. He examines black panther Huey P. Newton's performance of masculinity while also queering conventional readings of Van Peebles's film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). In a brilliant reading of Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power in "Saint Huey," Reid-Pharr unveils the complex racial politics of attempting not to be marked as "savage" while moving away from romantic "ancient paths" (144). Together, these sections lay out what Once You Go Black locates as a key tension in the desire to maintain the desirability of a black intellectual tradition while humanizing blackness. Theoretically, Reid-Pharr seems to believe that both are possible, but only if we "queer narratives that are obscured by traditional scripts" (171). Reid-Pharr's call is to open up blackness—recognizing...