Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity

Asian America

by Daniel Y. Kim

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation.

The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

Genres: Literary Criticism

319 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2005

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Kim contends that literary examinations of comparative ethnic literatures must consider not only what unites us, but what divides us. He compares the intersection of masculinity and race expressed in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to that expressed in Frank Chin’s writings (including Chickencoop Chinaman ). Kim contends that a system of homophobic meaning underwrites each text. The racism of white men is understood as a homosexual longing, whereby the claim is made “that white men look at black men in much the same way that men look at women – as bodies whose alterity is signaled by the wounds of castration they bear” (5). Kim asserts that Ellison’s texts functions within this cultural reading, and asserts that Black men reclaim their masculinity through artistic expression utilizing the vernacular. Kim contends that Chin views Asian masculinity through a model of longing whereby Chin’s Asian protagonists must appropriately mimic and artistically re-appropriate black masculinity (walking a line with representing homosexual desire) in order to claim their own vernacular masculinity. As Kim explains, “The thing that Chin laments, then, is not exactly that Asian men are the objects of racist love, but that they are not the objects of the right kind of racist love – the right kind being that which black male writers like Ellison find so galling” (142) Both texts show white racism as equivalent to homosexuality.

Although the book focuses on Chin and Ellison, Kim also discusses the writings of Robert Park and Franz Fanon.

I found Kim’s exploration of the ways Ellison’s ideas were linked to the nationalist writings of Baraka and Cleaver convincing and intriguing. I enjoyed his close readings of Invisible Man. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is his sustained close readings of texts, a standard that has dropped out of much contemporary criticism. I also appreciated the way Kim links the close readings of the literary texts to an exploration of the author’s writings on aesthetics. He succeeds in making claims not only about the systems of cultural meanings at work in the texts but the aesthetics in play in the works. Kim’s introduction does an excellent job explaining how systems of race, gender, and sexuality work together.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has given me a great foundation for my MA thesis