Reading Black Queer Vernacular in Black Literatures of the Americas, 1903-1967
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ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: “YOUSE AWFUL QUEER, CHAPPIE”: READING BLACK QUEER VERNACULAR IN BLACK LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS, 1903-1967 Seth Clark Silberman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor Carla L. Peterson Department of English Read together, twentieth-century representations of black male homoerotism and homosexuality written up to the Black Arts movement shape and complicate traditional definitions of a black racial literary canon. Far from marginal or clandestine, these black men differently depicted in prose and verse continue the kinds of “networks of affiliation” that Saidiya Hartman finds in the communal connections that shaped black life in the nineteenth-century US during slavery and Reconstruction, ones based on the “metaphorical aptitude” demonstrated by black vernacular folk tales and songs. Community founding was necessarily agile. It depended on presence of mind more than melanin as a strategy to wrest the sign of “blackness” from flesh indicating enslavement. It also incorporated rather than homogenized differences within a black racial “community among ourselves,” as Hartman calls it. “Youse awful queer chappie” examines how that kind of wily solidarity and resistance supports a body of texts that both contribute to a black literary tradition that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. characterizes as a gathering of “talking books” as well as fashion a particular hermeneutic and technique I call “black queer vernacular.” Sometimes, but not always, with the word queer, the black writers I study with this manuscript, tell a story of black masculinity not fungible but mobile. Any individual text or author provides merely one nexus in a textual technique of characters, types, words, and images that demonstrates how the sign of “blackness” incorporates both race and sexuality. Less a rejoinder to scholarship in the fields of African American studies or gay and lesbian studies, the manuscript draws from poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theory to regard an already present dialogue in twentieth century black literary studies. By moving from W.E.B. Du Bois’ landmark The Souls of Black Folk, through the Harlem Renaissance and London’s Caribbean Artists movement, toward the Black Arts movement, the manuscript highlights how Diaspora informs, even as it fades from, analyses of black representation. It talks back to, and expands, the defining aesthetics of the black racial literary canon. “YOUSE AWFUL QUEER, CHAPPIE”: READING BLACK QUEER VERNACULAR IN BLACK LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS, 1903-1967 by Seth Clark Silberman Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment Of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor Carla L. Peterson, chair Professor Mary Helen Washington Professor Susan Leonardi Professor Martha Nell Smith Professor Sheri L. Parks ©Copyright by Seth Clark Silberman 2005 For my mother, Cheryl Lynn Silberman (17 September 1946—9 July 2001), who gave me the blue eyes with which I see the world and taught me the fulfillment in looking; and for Craig Allen Seymour II, who encouraged me to use those eyes to read and managed always to lift me when my life was low. You are my friend. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Reading the Masculine Technique of Black Queer Vernacular ...............1 Chapter One: Fierce legibility, masculinity, and affinity: Hilton Als & Owen Dodson, James Baldwin & Eldridge Cleaver .............................................................................32 Chapter Two: Reading “queer” through a “community among ourselves”: Hughes to Marshall to Hurston to Du Bois....................................................................................65 Chapter Three: Situating Harlem amid the queer “streetgeist and folklore” of the New Negro movement ........................................................................................................119 SECTION A: FROM JOHNSON TO LOCKE, FROM SURVEY GRAPHIC TO NEW NEGRO ..........................136 SECTION B: LIGHTING HARLEM’S RENAISSANCE AFIRE!!: RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT AND ALAIN LOCKE READING EACH OTHER ...........................................................................................................147 SECTION C: “AN ALL-NEGRO EVENING IN [AND AROUND] THE COLOURED CABARETS OF NEW YORK”: WALROND, THURMAN, AND DILL........................................................................................190 Chapter Four: Speaking black queer vernacular psychoanalytically: Du Bois and Johnson, Fanon and Salkey ........................................................................................230 SECTION A: HARLEM’S DOUBLE-CONSCIOUSNESS AND “GREAT WANDERING SHADOWS”: W.E.B. DU BOIS AND JAMES WELDON JOHNSON.................................................................................................253 SECTION B: DIASPORA NÉGRITUDE, OR “THE CELEBRATION OF A BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH LITERATURE”.....................................................................................................................................280 SECTION C: “THOSE WHO WON’T SEE CAN’T SEE” NARRATING RACE, SEXUALITY, AND IMPERIALISM ANEW IN ANDREW SALKEY’S ESCAPE TO AN AUTUMN PAVEMENT...................................................288 Chapter Five: “Youse awful queer, chappie”: The kinship and insight of black queer “outsider”-intellectuals ...............................................................................................356 SECTION A: JIMMY’S “PRESERVATION OF [BLACK QUEER] INNOCENCE” ..........................................369 SECTION B: CLAUDE MCKAY’S RAY ................................................................................................385 SECTION C: LEROI JONES’ RAY AND JIMMY .....................................................................................415 Conclusion: Regarding black queer vernacular as a conversation point....................441 Bibliography:..............................................................................................................463 iii Introduction: Reading the Masculine Technique of Black Queer Vernacular “You know, I never understood the whole art-for-art’s-sake, for example. Because it seems to me that’s pure bullshit. It’s not even an argument. The connection you’ve got to make has to be rooted deep in you. And that is really deep in something else. “Most people learn how to protect themselves against life— very quickly. In my own case, if I learned how to protect myself, as I obviously should have, I’d have had to do it so soon that I would have to die. I’d—I would have to die then, you know, in effect. Since I couldn’t do that, I had to turn my back on that and go to the extreme, really. Which is to do my best to keep myself open. Really to work at that. “Because, you know, if any person closes himself up, then he just ceases to grow. If a writer does it, then he just doesn’t become a writer, y’know. In a way, the best and the worst things about me are connected with that necessity …” … “And, in this country [the US], what we call homosexuality is a grotesque kind of—of waxworks. You know? Which is the other side of what we call heterosexuality here.” … “Nobody makes any connections! So naturally you get, you know, you get this truncated, de-balled, galvanized activity which thinks of itself as sex. “It’s not sex at all. It’s pure desperation. It’s clinical. D’you know? It comes out of the effort to tell one’s self a lie about what human life is like. It comes out of the attempt to cling to definitions which cannot contain anybody’s life. “American homosexuality is a waste primarily because, if people were not so frightened of it—if it wouldn’t, you know—it really would cease in effect, as it exists in this country now, to exist. I mean the same way the Negro problem would disappear. People wouldn’t have to spend so much time being defensive—if they weren’t endlessly being condemned. I know a whole lot of people who aren’t homosexual at all—who think they are. That’s true. I know a lot of people who turn into junkies because they’re afraid they might be queer.” —James Baldwin, from interviews conducted between 1964 and 1966, quoted in Fern Marja Eckman’s The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (1968) 1 Even though I borrow this dissertation’s title from Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), I start “Youse awful queer, chappie” with two excerpts from the interviews that propel Fern Marja Eckman’s monograph, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. Cautiously, I begin with Baldwin and with these words of his. So typical is his epigraphic presence, his intimate remarks here on aesthetic politics and collective subjectivity might succumb all too easily to Baldwin’s expected role in literary studies like mine: figurehead for contemporary black gay male writing, or avatar of the so-called “conundrum” of rendering simultaneously racial blackness and homosexual masculinity. Both roles for Baldwin can function only as they ignore “the best and worst things about [him],” as he explains it. I have no investment in contributing to the way scholars exploit or extrapolate his life through his work. They fashion the words he published, wrote, or spoke to render him as the sole mid- twentieth-century beacon in a literary history of progress, organized as a constant— and moral—refinement of representations that supplant one another and ameliorate not just literary discourse but everyday life for black people subsequently “out.”