tiques of racial masculine politics, such as those of Kobena Mercer and Kaja ... Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston and its allusions to the homoerotic photo- ..... and intellectual support of the following colleagues: John Foster, Deborah ...
r?lEN IN COLOR I n t r o d u c i n g Race and the Subject o f Masculinities
MICHAEL
UEBEL
Let's talk about identity-from-above as well as identity-from-below. That's something that is rarely stressed, rarely examined, rarely specified. We need to get a handle on how . . . whiteness, maleness, and straightness functions over time and space in relation to blackness or brownness or yellowness or womanness or gayness or lesbianness, etc. — Cornel West, "A Matter of Life and Death" Identity politics has emerged i n the past few years as the contemporary c r i t i cal watchword. Recent special issues o f New Formations, Critical Inquiry, October, and diacritics,' along w i t h a proliferating number o f essays and books, attest to the explosion of interest i n the politics o f identity. Drawing on the critical methods o f gender studies, queer studies, film studies, ethnography, and studies o f colonialism, identity politics scrutinizes the effects o f cultural forces on identities and the forms i n w h i c h identities are imagined. It describes a historical approach to subjectivity, attentive to the ways we understand individuals as products o f a field o f determinants, at once psychic, institutional, interracial, bodily, homoerotic, homosocial, aesthetic, rhetorical, national. It deconstructs the opposition between the social and the psychic by obliging us, as Kaja Silverman famously puts i t , "to approach history always through the refractions o f desire and identification, and to read race and class insistently i n relation to sexuality" and gender (Male Subjectivity 300). And, most significantly, identity politics opens the way for describing identincatory practices as well as their products, for delineating ongoing processes as well as "final" meanings.^ The present collection, subtended by the discourses and strategies of idendty politics, debates the meanings o f identities and the ethical questions attending them from a relatively focused critical perspective. I n order to "Linderstand subjectivity as constituted by and constitutive of multiple posi::ons, the contributors locate the subject at the intersection o f race and mas-
2
Michael Uebel
culinity. Around the central question " H o w do men inhabit simultaneously their color and their gender?" others are elaborated: H o w is the imbrication o f race and male subjectivity to be understood as a historically, culturally specific construct? What are the psychological and moral imphcations o f transgression and identification for racial difference and masculine performance? What cultural limits define racial masculine identity and to what extent are they enforceable and finally transgressable? W h i c h specific practices o f representation are important to understanding race and the subject o f masculinities? This last question i n particular enlarges the scope o f current identity inquiries and begs for a deeper understanding o f gender and racial performativities. For while many practices o f representation —such as blues, signifying, jazz, blackface minstrelsy, hairstyle, rap^ —have been closely examined for the mechanics o f racial identity, little attention has been given to their significance as racial masculine performance. The essays collected here emphasize the provisional nature o f racial masculine identities.* Although treating masculinities as varied as those o f Andre Gide, Eddie Murphy, Malcolm X, and Bruce Lee, they are linked by the same assumption: racial maleness is the origin as well as the product o f local transactions between the social and the psychic, o f negotiations among popular forms o f representation and political ideologies, and o f technologies o f performance. In other words, throughout this volume racial male subjectivity is read insistently i n the context o f the historical and cultural forces o f w h i c h identity is both the result and the potential agentReading men i n the context o f race is thus a dialectical intervention: an attempt to understand men at the (construction) site o f specific power relations, each relation mediating the reproduction and transformation o f another. Though the challenge to "race" masculinity is embraced collectively, each o f the thirteen essays here answers that challenge i n a unique way. Each provokes a reformulation o f the critical terms w i t h w h i c h gender and cultural theories usually map configurations o f race and masculinities. As a first step toward rethinking what Cornel West calls "identity-fromabove"—signified for h i m by the concepts o f masculinity, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and whiteness —the present essays explode the monolithic, h o m o geneous categories o f dominance into their historically differentiated economies. Attention to the specific historicity and textuahty o f privileged, often ideologically invisible, categories such as whiteness prevents the acceptance of their uniformity and autonomy Demystifying univocal, inevitable "myths" i n a Barthesian fashion, the present essays maintain that categories such as whiteness and masculinity have no single "natural" or "objective" stand-
Men i n Color
3
ing beyond the cultures they organize. But, o f course, denying the cultural autonomy o f whiteness, by asserting its particularity, does not amount to ignoring the power o f its "autonomy-effects" —the ways i n w h i c h it appears as a generality Thus Richard Dyer, i n his essay on the coupling o f bodybuilding and colonialism, contends that white masculinities must be understood as historically specific constructions at the same time that they are recognized i n their generality. " I t is," he writes, "the ability to pass themselves off as not particular that allows them to go on being, w i t h i n the regime o f representation that they produce, 'invisible'" (289; this volume). Theorizing identity-from-above, then, necessitates an attention to the interplay o f racial masculine particularities and generalities. The criticism o f racial masculinity in this volume thus demands this strategic assertion: that the opposition between identity-from-above and identityfrom-below is a false one. The essays collected here reformulate this opposition as a vital, not always amiable, dialogue. Delineating the dominant or privileged depends upon analyzing the marginalized or colonized —and vice versa. As Christopher Looby, Eric Lott, and Gayle Wald demonstrate, whiteness is complexly structured by fantasies o f blackness; and, as Herman Beavers argues, definitions o f black masculine identity crucially hinge on investments i n white male identity. Such interdependence shows that the formation o f masculine identity is never strictly, so to speak, a black-and-white issue. The essays collectively refuse to suppress the crossing and uncrossing of central issues o f race by the heterogeneity o f masculine sex/gender interests and class/ethnic identities: Leerom Medovoi understands 19505 youth culture i n terms o f its masculinist challeiige to the racial, generational, and class hegemonies o f white America; Eric Lott reads Elvis impersonators as a reclamation o f working-class machismo; Jonathan Dollimore argues for the political force o f crossing lines o f racial and sexual difference; and Yvonne Tasker interrogates Hong Kong and American martial arts films for what they reveal about nationahst and homoerotic mascuUne identifications. Folding identity-from-above into identity-from-below, and vice versa, constitutes a refusal to reauthorize the historically and culturally dominant — whiteness, masculinity, straightness —a refusal that is not necessarily reducible to an opposition to the entangling o f whiteness w i t h blackness, masculinity w i t h femininity, straightness w i t h queerness. This volume attempts to dieorize the dominant without endorsing, replicating, or valorizing i t . Responding to the need for theorizing dominance, the collection seeks a way out o f and beyond the d o m i n i o n o f identities-from-above: here it is precisely ± e "above" that is held for questioning. I n the context o f American history,
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Michael Uebel
as several contributors make clear, and i n the recent context o f pop singers Marky Mark or Vanilla Ice, the supersession o f whiteness entailed ways into blackness. Yet "abolishing" whiteness is often only appropriation o f and v i o lence to blackness. A critical look at whiteness, enabled theoretically by a critical black perspective, not only w i l l suggest that whiteness, too, is socially constructed (and therefore deconstructible), but also w i l l condemn the d o m i nance it risks erecting and concealing. Looby's and Dollimore's essays move toward a liberation from the dominance o f whiteness through sexuality, an overcoming o f race through same-sex desire. Lott's essay creates a space for the possibility o f dismantling dominance through practices o f impersonation, where claims o f whiteness or class in relation to Elvis are always up for grabs. These essays insist on the links between practice and theory, as they try to push theory into its local, historical domain. "Practice," Gilles Deleuze postulated, "is a set o f relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this w a l l " (206). Together, the theories o f raciahzed masculinities i n this volume evoke practices aimed at transgressing the confining hmits o f theorizing only identities-from-above. Masculinity comes to designate a whole range o f cultural forms and practices, and our use o f the multiplex category masculinities i n the title o f this essay and volume signals our wish to account for the local diversities o f the subject. The category masculinities is not meant to be a stable consolidation o f historically specific subject-positions or a collective term for masculinity, but a polysemy denying the autonomy and stability o f male identity as it claims to specify and interpret masculine self-perception, performativity, and existence. The term brings into play the recognition o f the profound multiplicity and conchtional status o f the historical experience o f male subjects. Masculinity becomes not the defining quality o f men, o f their fantasies and real experiences o f self and other, but one coordinate o f their identity that exists i n a constant dialectical relation w i t h other coorchnates. This dialectical constructionist view o f racial and gender subjectivities d i rectly challenges the dominant view o f popular culture, described by Philip Cohen as "the mere effect o f a collision between dominant and subordinate ideologies, or some kind o f open space where chscourses circulate" ("Tarzan" 25), merely to consolidate and invigorate a hegemonic discourse. Far from positing a static model o f culture that forecloses the possibility o f political progress, the contributors inscribe racial masculine existence and imagination w i t h i n popular cultures that are constantly shifting the meanings that trachtionally ground them. I n the active production o f new meanings, alliances
Men i n Color
5
such as the masculine w i t h patriarchy or blackness w i t h absolute otherness (and thus, whiteness w i t h nondifFerence) betray their ideological
flexibility.
Such couplings reveal the contingency and fragility o f their o w n encodings and the possibilities for altering their o w n terms o f reference. The essays i n this collection suggest that the value o f using masculinities as an active term i n race- and gender-based criticism depends upon its i n scription w i t h i n a systematics o f performance. Here racial and gender identities emerge as dynamic performances scripted, rehearsed, and (re)enacted i n the presence o f one another.' Yet any such insistence o n the antiessentiahst ontology o f selfhood does not alone guarantee, as Robyn Wiegman's essay strikingly reminds us, that masculine identity w i l l not be posited as a homogeneous subject category, construed w h o l l y w i t h i n a monolithic subjective function, an elision o f crucial differences among men. Wiegman calls into question the idealizations o f the male bond and its dream o f masculine mutuality i n the critical w o r k o f Leslie Fiedler and t w o o f his contemporary adapters. The significance o f race i n representations o f the male bond, she argues, has been displaced and silenced by the construction o f a mythic white masculine subjectivity (Fiedler), the romanticization o f male h o m o sexuality as the radical potential o f democracy (Robert K. Martin), and the figuring
of a m u l t i f o r m self incorporating and effacing cultural difference
(Joseph A. Boone). These configurations o f maleness transmute racial difference into a model o f masculine sameness by disavowing the complex interplay o f racial and gender difference that crucially underwrites masculinities. W i e g man's metacritical treatment o f interracial male bonding and quest narratives thus usefully contextualizes the critical stance employed by the other essays in this volume, by highlighting the interchange o f race, gender, and sexuality i n the construction o f specific masculinities. The central identity configuration posited throughout this collection, the dialectic between racial and gender difference, provides a fertile field for psychoanalytically charged accounts that reveal the especially competitive, contradictory sites o f attraction and repulsion, desire and violence, and appropriation and disavowal occupied by racial masculinities. Dollimore's and Tasker's essays enlist Freudian and Lacanian accounts o f colonialism, such as those o f Frantz Fanon and H o m i Bhabha, as well as psychoanalytic critiques o f racial masculine politics, such as those o f Kobena Mercer and Kaja Silverman,' to expose the racial dialectics o f narcissism and aggression. The chsavowal o f difference (fetish) and its recognition (phobia), for instance, are two attitudes toward otherness that shape cross-racial identifications and the c^oltural production o f masculinities. I n the presence o f the other, the sub-
6
Michael Uebel
ject is intensely ambivalent, poised between desire and fear, incitement and interdiction, mastery and anxiety. Offering an incisive analysis o f the psychomachia inherent i n the position o f mastery, Christopher Looby reads the memoir o f Thomas Wentworth Higginson, white commander o f an all-black U n i o n Army regiment during the Civil War, i n order to lay bare the sublimated fantasies inflecting his camaraderie w i t h , and love for, his soldiers. Looby shows how Higginson's cross-racial identification depends on a logic o f recognition and disavowal: the commander acknowledges his "racial envy" at the same time as he sanitizes his fetish objects under an aestheticizing gaze. Higginson thus retains the sovereignty o f whiteness while indulging i n a fantasy o f blackness. Looby's reading complements Gayle Wald's i n underscoring the social and psychological ramifications o f "loving blackness," * and, further, joins Richard Dyer's and Eric Lott's readings to address the conflictive construction and symbolic value o f white masculinity. The symbolic or metaphoric values o f racial masculinities are rarely static. Several essays converge on a reading o f racial masculinities as unstable icons marking mobile, shifting positionahties. The essays o f Jose Mufioz, Gayle Wald, Harry Stecopoulos, Eric Lott, and Christopher Looby highlight the complex, culturally contingent construction o f racial masculine identities as a function o f not always coherent processes o f self-fashioning. Mufioz reads Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston and its allusions to the homoerotic photographs o f Mapplethorpe and Van Der Zee as constructing shifting fantasies and communal identities against the social background o f not only white, but heterosexist, supremacies i n the age o f A I D S . Wald analyzes the career o f white jazz musician, hipster, and self-styled "voluntary Negro" Mezz Mezzrow, revealing how his racial passing is irrevocably coupled w i t h mobile erotic, masculine, and aesthetic identifications. Stecopoulos explores the way i n w h i c h turn-of-the-century white middle-class American men used "raced" cultural fantasies to prop up both their class identity and their sense o f manhood during times o f professional and financial failure. Stecopoulos demonstrates h o w texts such as the best-selling Tarzan of the Apes (1914) offer imperial fantasies o f racial supremacy aimed at tenuously "resolving" moments o f white male middle-class self-doubt by means o f an uneasy fascination w i t h and appropriation o f black male physicality. Discussing the symbolic value o f racial identity, Richard Dyer and Herman Beavers turn to the gendered, raced body for its disclosures about the machinery o f racism and colonialism. For both contributors, the racial male body manifests contradictory discursive practices and power investments. Dyer's
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7
richly suggestive reading o f the white male body i n Italian peplum films o f the late
19SOS
and early 1960s treats skin color and muscle-contoured bodies
as expressions o f control, signifiers o f colonial hegemony, where power derives from the simultaneous staging and transcending o f hierarchies. The white male hero reigns supreme at the same time as he supersedes the system he rules; his power is at once particular and nonspecific, above the particular. I n this way the hero can be hypermasculine and suprahuman, white and strikingly tanned, a conqueror o f both primitive, non-white men and futuristic machine technology. At the heart o f these paradoxical conditions. Dyer suggests, lies "perhaps the secret o f all power." Though the mechanism o f power, the means by w h i c h racial masculinities signify specifically and unrestrictedly (invisibly), is transcultural —"the secret o f all power" —the forms that it takes are culturally specific. Beavers i n vestigates the "secret" o f Eddie Murphy's power as a troubling icon o f racial progress by situating his "coolness" —as sign o f rehef, control, and transgress i o n — i n the political context o f racism, homophobia, and misogyny. He also situates Murphy's dialectical, cool pose i n relation to Richard Pryor's radical appropriation o f cool as a way o f restoring the African American male "body in pain." Murphy's persona —consistent whether he plays himself or a character—allows h i m , like the heroic peplum bodybuilder, to cross the fixed hues o f racial identity. Transcending the limits o f race and body, Murphy and Pryor can reclaim, even transform, black experience. In Robin D. G. Kelley's reading o f Malcolm X's autobiographical account o f his teenage years, the male body w i t h its "fashionable ghetto adornments," to use Malcolm's o w n words, constitutes a forceful assertion o f race, class, and gender prerogative. Malcolm's teenage years, Kelley suggests, coincided w i t h a system o f wartime cultural pohtics i n w h i c h the cool hipster subculrore o f black males molded, for some, new identities relatively free o f the constraints o f patriotic fervor and petit bourgeois morality. The zoot suit, the conk, and the moves and language o f the "hep cat" signified the ability to demystify the dominant ideology while remaining tied to it through gestures of appropriation. Recasting the male body and the ways it signifies is above a l l a pohtical enterprise, aimed at producing new sohdarities and exposing the bounds o f the dominant and " n o r m a l " as fragile and subject to revision. By mapping identities i n terms o f colonial fantasy and the iconography c: racial masculine bodies, theoretical models emerge that are aimed at sup•nlanting reductive accounts o f identity formation at the intersection o f race and masculinity. Critical paradigms that merely figure ambivalent fantasies o f identification and the symbolic value o f male racial bodies reproduce a false
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Michael Uebel
binarism o f solidarity and transgression. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, argues persuasively for comprehending transgression i n terms o f solidarity, difference i n terms o f identification. Thus, the opposition always implied between difference and identification cannot be neatly described as contradictory Part o f the reason that the opposition cannot be contained, as Dollimore suggests, has to do w i t h the category o f difference itself When Dollimore writes i n Sexual Dissidence, "we are not all the same. We are differences w h i c h radically proximate" (229), he emphasizes the extent to w h i c h identity entails opposition and proxiinity. Difference itself challenges radical separation by foregrounding the contiguity o f identities. By animating the play and friction o f identities, the "struggle around positionahties," as Stuart Hall puts it ("New Ethnicities" 28), difference directs our attention to the "contact zone" o f male subjectivity. As one useful paradigm for theorizing the embattled terrain o f masculine identity formation, difference offers an important model for understanding how men inhabit their color. Dollimore's critical treatment o f marginalized histories, i n w h i c h race and male homosexuality converge, showcases a larger project, as he puts i t , "to think difference i n terms o f culture." Through the writings and life dramas o f Andre Gide, Jean Genet, and Frantz Fanon, DoUimore radically redefines politics as inflected w i t h desire, w i t h "deviant" forms o f sexuality and fantasy imbued w i t h special knowledges o f and identifications w i t h , an other. I n Dollimore's view, crossing racial, class, and national boundaries, and, most significantly, the lines imposed by normative sexuality and erotic practice, is a vital, empowering act o f social critique. By putting what might be called a queer spin on humanist discourses, he suggests that transgressive desire for the other displaces and potentially dismantles racism, colonialism, and imperialism. He reconstitutes the universal humanist discourses o f alterity, w h i c h underwrite these nefarious isms, as humanist processes o f difference and proximation, opposition and solidarity. Or, to quote a trenchant aphorism from his Sexual Dissidence; "To be against (opposed to) is also to be against (close up, i n proximity to) or, i n other words, up against" (229). In Dollimore's political reformulation o f difference there is no r o o m for the sort o f relativist claims that S. P. Mohanty recently has identified i n contemporary critical idioms. The extreme relativist position, according to Mohanty, radicalizes diflference in the attempt to proximate identities: i f one posits separateness, two spaces, and then develops general interpretive criteria to account for both contexts, one ends up asserting "that all spaces are equivalent: that they have equal value, that since the lowest common principle o f evaluation is all that I can evoke, I cannot—and consequently need n o t —
Men i n Color
9
chink about how your space impinges on mine, or h o w my history is defined together w i t h yours" (67). Mohanty offers an antidote to the dangers of relativism: a historicizing approach to cultural practices that fully assesses human agency and the decisions constituting i t . Relativist evaluations o f culture and agency, this collection asserts, fall short o f specifying, i n order to adjudicate, the terms i n w h i c h we might understand the intersection o f race and masculinities at the level o f human performativity. Elaborating on the varieties o f racial male cultural practice and the ways they are interpreted, these essays affirm the "radical proximation" o f race and gender by taking advantage o f recent philosophical discussions and feminist reformulations o f gendered identity. The centrality o f performance i n these recent critiques o f identity owes to the prevalent poststructuralist, Nietzschean behef that there is no psychological core i n humans, no "ineffable interiority" o f "true identity" (Butler, Gender 136) —put simply, you are constituted by what you do (and have done) and h ow you are interpreted doing what you do (and have done).' Basing gendered subjectivity on praxis suggests that bodies have "no ontological status apart from the various acts w h i c h constitute [their] reality" (Butler, Gender 136). We must formulate the cultural politics o f race and masculinities i n a turn away from defunct ontologies, toward the personal and political economies o f performance and style. Race, sexuality, gender, and nationality are increasingly defined less as fixed identities rooted i n bodies, normative sexuality, nature, or geography, and more as dynamic and dramatic modes, the sum o f one's cultural practices. Imphcit i n all the essays collected here is the assumption that racial masculinities are dynamic modes o f cultural practice —shifting, repeating sets o f performances denoting not a fixed or essential subject category but rather "a relative point o f convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations" (Butler, Gender 10). Ralph Ellison's compelling view of blackness as "perpetual beginning" —a process, as Kimberly Benston puts i t , subject to renewal and "generated from performance to performance" (173) —can help us, then, to investigate whiteness, or black or white maleness — i n short, the color of manhood —as a revisionary process, a constitutive performance. I n scribing race and the subject o f masculinities w i t h i n the cultural politics o f performativity generates an authentic ethics and politics o f representation, a critique that accounts for the formative, not merely the expressive, roles o f subjectivity i n constituting social and pohtical existence.'" Cultural practice, the per-formative aspect o f identities, is inescapably bound up w i t h style; gender is imagined as "corporeal style" (Butler, Gender 139); race is tied to "practices o f styhzation" (Mercer, "Black Hair" 51); and
lo
Michael Uebel
communities are distinguished "by the style i n w h i c h they are imagined" (B. Anderson 15). Eric Lott and Gayle Wald locate style at the center o f their inquiries into the tangled dynamics o f gender, sex, and class underpinning racial impersonation. Wald shows h o w the subjective drama o f Mezzrow's identity replaces a paradigm o f fixed, essential identity w i t h one o f racial masculine style and performance. Lott applies the tools o f cultural ethnography to popular appropriations o f Elvis to interrogate the fantasies o f black and white style, w h i c h are inescapably fantasies o f class, animating masculine performance. I n terms that overlap Looby's and Wald's accounts o f whiteness, he shows h o w impersonation vitally depends upon a dialectical process o f proximation: the lived proximity to an other, a proximity that at the same time is forgotten or disavowed. To "be" Elvis is to inhabit the conflicted terrain o f his style, since it is finally style that enables proximation. Here, style manifests those racial and class subtexts structuring white working-class masculinity that i t works so hard to enact and reclaim. While this collection oflfers multiple readings o f specifically contextualized racial male subjectivities, two essays i n particular, those o f Leerom Medovoi and Yvonne Tasker, enact larger strategies for performing disenchanting and juxtaposing interpretive readings. These essays suggest the extraordinarily intertextual nature o f reading race and the subject o f masculinities. Working i n what he describes as a deconstructively informed cultural studies, Medovoi complicates Stuart Hall's notion o f oppositional reading i n order to i n terrogate the popular responses to, and social positionings o f the 19^^ film Blackboard Jungle. He emphasizes the degree to w h i c h any site o f opposition, or reading, is exclusionary: oppositionality and counterhegemonic solidarity depend o n disavowing ideological difference. Yvonne Tasker, w r i t i n g on the multiple racial discourses o f masculine identity i n Hong Kong and American martial arts films, acknowledges along w i t h Medovoi the value o f competing, oppositional readings. She traces the different fantasies o f empowerment staged i n three cinematic traditions: the macho nationalism o f Bruce Lee i n Hong Kong films; the performance and posing o f hard white male bodies as the objects o f a "homospectatorial l o o k " " i n American cinema; and the "fluid mascuhnity" o f kung fu comedy. Whether approached by a liberal humanist inquiry or by a decentering antiessentialism, the topics around w h i c h the essays organize themselves—dialectics/dialogics
o f identity, difference/identification, performa-
tivity/style—reflect what has been called "a renewed attention to ethics" (Harpham 7). The topics serve to mark points o f intersection between the ways discourses o f race are treated i n this collection and the ethical c o m -
Men i n Color
ii
mitments and descriptions attending them. Such points of intersection hinge on what might be termed an ethical "conceptual base" (17), one mediating between a n o t i o n o f cultural identity as a matter of "being" and one of "becoming."
Racial masculine identities thus describe a process of positioning:
they name the ways raced men position themselves i n relation to the past that has shaped them and to the future they w i l l shape. They possess a history, but also the power to perform, or transform, that history The power of transformation, the ways i n w h i c h power is exercised or undermined, and the choices power necessitates and depends upon, all require a postulation of what ought to be, a recognition o f the obligation the future places on the individual subject. I n his recent book on ethical discourse and imperativity, Geoffrey Harpham reminds us of the significance of situating the ought "at the dead center of ethics" (18). Ought is a w o r d , he puts i t , "hovering between the 'constative' and the 'performative' " (18), between presence and praxis, between what is and what is to be. Ethics, i n this dialogic description, describes a performative relation of identity to real and imaginative (ideal) conditions o f existence.'^ Addressing this relation, then, marks an "ethical moment," the opportunity for both critical description and political intervention.''^ For i f the categories race and masculinity crucially depend upon the dialectics of what is (bodies, the other, the past) and what will be or what is i n process (desire, performance, the future), then we cannot, and ought not, disengage our readings o f racial mascuhnities from an attention to the responsibilities and commitments demanded i n the ethical moment. This moment, w h i c h Dick Hebdige describes as the "yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place n o w " ("Some sons" 38), compels us to the critical task o f acknowledging the agency of masculinities and identifying the systems o f meaning —race, sex, class, nation —that chat agency constructs and potencially deconstructs. I n their efforts to formulate the ambivalences resisting totalization, these essays locate racial male subjectivity not at the margins but i n the contested space between the constative and the performative —that is, i n the broad and broadly acknowledged territory of ethics. The ethical dimension to Dyer's historicism is clear: we must see systems of dominance such as whiteness as both agent and result of their historical moment of dominance, to the point that we recognize them as self-invented, and this prior to our forming any politics that w o u l d sabotage them. This collection, by offering multiple paradigms for reading the cultural intersections o f race and masculinities, enriches our general understanding of identities as constructed and negotiated w i t h i n and
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Michael Uebel
against a complex historical matrix o f alterities, against a web o f differences. It is the exclusion or privileging o f these differences that raises important questions about reading strategies and pohtical practice.
Notes
This essay (done i n 1993) owes a great deal, except its imperfections, to the generosity and intellectual support o f the f o l l o w i n g colleagues: John Foster, Deborah M c D o w e l l , Nick Frankel, Eric Lott, Laura Sanchez, Vance Smith, and Debra Morris. 1. See New Formations 5 (1988); Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992); October 61 (summer 1992); and diacritics 24 (summer-fall 1994). 2. The end o f this paragraph calls for a footnote i n the f o r m o f a "pocket b i b l i o g raphy" o f w r i t i n g s o n identity politics. Such a bibliography w o u l d not fit here, and probably need not since m u c h o f the w o r k o n identity politics is already absorbed into the critical mainstream. To take a shortcut, I refer the reader to the "references," "suggestions for further reading," "bibliography," and "notes" sections o f the f o l l o w i n g collections: Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, eds.. Cultural Studies; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, eds.. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader; Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet; Queer Politics and Social Theory. 3. Here a cursory list must include Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature; A Vernacular Theory; Gates, The Signifying Monkey; A Theory of African American Literary Criticism; Nero, "Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying i n Contemporary Black Gay Literature"; Lott, " 'The Seeming Counterfeit': Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy" and Love and Theft; Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics"; Toop, The Rap Attack; African Jive to New York Hip Hop; Spencer, ed.. The Emergence of Rap and the Emergence of Black; and Rose, Black Noise. 4. Those w r i t i n g w i t h i n the present-day politics o f identity insist o n the value o f identity as a strategic term. Confining the term to its provisional use i n order t o complicate and question comprehensive, formulaic paradigms and to challenge their political validity, the politics o f identity envisions the disenchanting o f identity and its traditional forms o f calculation. For example, Judith Butler prefers "to think about the invocation o f identity as a strategic provisionality, using the t e r m , but k n o w i n g when to let it go, living its contingency, and subjecting i t to a political challenge concerning its usefulness" ("Discussion" n o ) . And Stanley A r o n o w i t z writes: "A solution [to the problem o f needing a generalized theoretical discourse o f identity] is to offer theoretical formulations as strategic" ("Reflections" 103). I n this spirit o f disenchantment, Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr, i n their editors' i n t r o d u c t i o n to the "Identities" issue o f Critical Inquiry, view identity politics as an emergent critique o f the "cliche-ridden" (62^) critical discourses o f the 1980s and their 1990s incarna-
Men i n Color
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cions, discourses ruled by the triumvirate Race, Class, and Gender. The same spirit o f disenchantment informs this collection o f essays. £. This treatment o f identity i n general —racial maleness specifically —harmonizes w e l l w i t h Joan W. Scott's recent call for the historicization o f identities as a way o f shifting the emphasis o f political correctness, from a n o t i o n o f stable identity as a cause o f difference and discrimination to a n o t i o n o f unstably proximate identities that are the "never-secured effect o f a process o f enunciation o f cultural difference" ( " M u k i c u l t u r a l i s m " 19). Scott continues; " i t makes more sense to teach our students and tell ourselves that identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is ambiguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that subjects are produced through m u l t i p l e identifications, some o f w h i c h become p o l i t i cally salient for a time i n certain contexts, and that the project o f history is not to rectify identity but to understand its p r o d u c t i o n as an ongoing process o f differentiation, relentless i n its repetition, but also —and this seems to me the i m p o r t a n t political point—subject to redefinition, resistance, and change" (19). 6. See Butler, Gender Trouble 1-25;
Bodies That Matter 1-23;
and "Critically Queer."
7. See, for starters, Fanon, Block Skin, White Masks; Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse" and " O f M i m i c r y and Man; The Ambivalence o f Colonial Discourse"; Mercer and Julien, "Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity; .\; Mercer, "Skin Head Sex Thing; Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary"; and Silverman, " W h i t e Skin, B r o w n Masks: The Double Mimesis, or W i t h lawTence i n Arabia." 8. "Loving blackness," bell hooks reminds us i n Black Looks, cuts t w o ways: as revo-Uiionary intervention, it decolonizes our minds, transmuting self-hatred and the devaluing o f racial difference under w h i t e supremacy into the political resistance o f self-love; as appropriation and fetishization o f black culture, it commodifies difference as capital, objectifying cultural difference and perpetuating racism (see hooks. Black Looks 9-20). 9. As Nietzsche put it i n On the Genealogy of Morals, "there is no 'being' behind doing, e j e c t i n g , becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed —the deed is everything" (4^; qtd. i n Butler, Gender Trouble 25). 10. Here, the idea o f a "politics o f representation" follows that o f Stuart Hall, w h i c h I have paraphrased (see Hall, "New Ethnicities" 27). : i . I b o r r o w the term from Diana Fuss's essay, "Fashion and the Homospectatorial l o o k , " on the lesbian-looks encoded i n women's fashion photography and adverzsmg, homoerotic looks theorized generally " i n terms o f a visual structuring and Identification that participates i n organizing the sexual identity o f any social object" 736). :2. I am applying here Stuart Hall's definition o f cultural identity ("a matter o f r e c o m i n g ' as w e l l as ' b e i n g ' " ) from his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" to Harpham's n o t i o n o f ethics conceived o f as "a necessary, and necessarily impure and
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Michael Uebel
unsystematic, mediation between unconscious or instinctual life and its cognitive and cultural transformation" (i8). 13. The idea o f an ethics o f performativity traces its origins to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book I , Chapter 7 (1098a ^ff.), where an analogy is drawn between man's relation to living the good life and a lyre-player's relation to playing the lyre w e l l . Happiness, the good life, depends on performance, a n o t i o n that has been called Aristotle's "starting-point for ethical e n q u i r y " (Maclntyre ^8). See Aristotle 943. 14. The issue o f the compatibility o f the dual interventionist commitments i n contemporary cultural studies —the goals o f describing real conditions o f existence and transforming them i n the name o f a less oppressive, more just society —is critiqued by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Laurie Anne W h i t t from the standpoint o f postmodernity and ecologically informed criticism. Slack and W h i t t rightly contend that w i t h i n cultural studies the end or destination o f such interventionist commitments goes u n articulated and unspecified. I w o u l d like to suggest that inserting and emphasizing the performative basis o f ethics w i t h i n discussions o f race and masculinities, or the objects o f cultural studies more generally, moves toward specifying what they call "the normative bases o f [cultural theorists'] theory and practice"
(572).
