"In bold and beautifully crafted close readings, Reid-Pharr
challenges many of the structuring absences that have shaped the
fields of African-American literary studies, queer studies, and
American Studies. His provocative arguments about sexuality, race,
and masculinity are unsettling, in the best sense of that
word."
--Siobhan B. Somerville, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
aProvocatively and often brilliantly, this book disturbs some of
our most fundamental thinking about the role of choice, literary
influence, collective identity, and the racial erotic in African
American letters. Reid-Pharr engages these questions--sometimes
with the subtler edge of his wit and other times with the sharpness
of cutting-edge theory--but always with an eye to re-orienting us
as readers toward what it means to inhabit, or refuse, the skin of
identity.a
--Marlon Ross, author of "Manning the Race"
aA deeply local and deeply ethical book and Reid-Pharr is
willing to risk the misunderstanding in order to insist on the
importance of black political agency. There is a refreshing honesty
in the way Reid-Pharr directs his comments toward readers.a--"GC
Advocate"
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 notinevitable, 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.
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