Once You Go Black: Desire, Choice and Black Masculinity in Post-War America

by Robert F. Reid-Pharr

2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, LGBT Studies

Richard Wright. Ralph Ellison. James Baldwin. Literary and cultural critic Robert Reid-Pharr asserts that these and other post-World War II intellectuals announced the very themes of race, gender, and sexuality with which so many contemporary critics are now engaged. While at its most elemental Once You Go Black is an homage to these thinkers, it is at the same time a reconsideration of black Americans as agents, and not simply products, of history. Reid-Pharr contends that our current notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they simply been forced onto the black community. Instead, he argues, black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural today.

Turning first to the late and relatively obscure novels of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, Reid-Pharr suggests that each of these authors rejects the idea of the black as innocent. Instead they insisted upon the responsibility of all citizens--even the most oppressed--within modern society. Reid-Pharr then examines a number of responses to this presumed erosion of black innocence, paying particular attention to articulations of black masculinity by Huey Newton, one of the two founders of the Black Panther Party, and Melvin Van Peebles, director of the classic film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song."

Shuttling between queer theory, intellectual history, literary close readings, and autobiography, Once You Go Black is an impassioned, eloquent, and elegant call to bring the language of choice into the study of black American literature and culture. At the same time, it represents a hard-headed rejection of the presumed inevitability of what Reid-Pharr names racial desire in the production of either culture or cultural studies.

Genres: Sexuality

184 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007

About the author

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I near the end of the semester, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage as fully as I'd like to with all these theoretical texts, but Reid-Pharr is a surprisingly lucid and accessible (self-proclaimed) queer theorist. I'll confess that I found some of his writing a bit repetitive, not to mention that at times I felt he was repeating his ideas over and over again (and not in the Judith Butler kind of way, where her repetitions are both necessary for comprehension and continually add things on to an already complex idea). But ultimately, I really appreciate his attempt to locate theory in a more pragmatic experiential sphere--he keeps in mind that people are living creatures, and not merely ideological constructs that can be marionetted around for the purpose of his book. Thus, his approach--one that veers dangerously close to the ol' American "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" sort of mantra, but doesn't quite hit those troubled waters--keeps me very much in check as I think about his theories. Though, as I said, he wants to make clear that he thinks we need to escape the post-slavery conceptualization of blackness as a sort of "profound innocence" (in that Black Americans are culturally imagined as incapable of evading the historical legacy of slavery--within and without the black community), he does not discount the effects of history on the individual. He wants, however, people of all shapes and sizes to think of themselves as, essentially, free agents who are not eternally trapped in their communal pasts. Thus, he employs a few existentialist thinkers (Sartre pops up a few times, as does de Beauvoir, if I recall correctly), but challenges them at their face value.

The chapter on Baldwin is really fascinating, especially as I was reading Baldwin's "Another Country" simultaneously (and, I should say, not enjoying it)--as was the Huey Newton one. But really, read the intro and the conclusion, and you've got a pretty good idea of what's going on in the text. The rest is the icing on top, as it were. This wasn't revelatory by any means, but I think taken in tandem with other contemporary queer/race theories, it's a really nice addition.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Provocative, but too opaquely argued for my taste.