"Ironic soil" : recuperative rhythms and negotiated nationalisms

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Stefanie K. Dunning

The fact of the matter is that major nationalist theoreticians have generally been exceedingly humanistic.... In fact, a strong tendency to reach beyond themselves toward union with mankind has been a marked characteristic of most nationalist theoreticians from David Walker to Paul Robeson. The nationalists' concern for their fellow man should be kept in mind in order to avoid doing violence to the meaning of historic black nationalism. (Stuckey 28)

I worry at this particular moment in our history where a lot of the gains that were brought about, to a certain extent, by some of the more positive attributes of nationalism are really being threatened. As much as I would like to eliminate the radically exclusionary attitudes of certain forms of black nationalism, I don't want to get rid of Affirmative Action and I really feel strongly about making these distinctions. (Coco Fusco in Black Nations/Queer Nations?) (2)

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Throughout his essay "It's Raining Men: Notes on the Million Man March," Robert Reid-Pharr eloquently describes the difficulty that black nationalist discourses have in relation to homosexuality (164-75). At the root of black nationalist discourses is an assumption that blackness and homosexuality are mutually exclusive, that queer-identified people are "selfish, unnatural [and] anathema to the building of a strong black nation" (Williams 136). This notion that blackness and heterosexuality are natural pairs and that "authentic" blackness cannot contain or does not include queer identifications as well, is one that has been aptly deconstructed by critics such as Philip Brian Harper, Audre Lorde, Wahneema Lubiano, Dwight McBride, Kendall Thomas, Rhonda M. Williams, and others. (3) Reid-Pharr identifies the blatant homophobia embodied specifically in the rhetoric of the Million Man March by noting that "if the real message of the march was that it is going to take a heroic black masculinity to restore order to our various communities, especially poor and working-class communities, then it follows that black gay men are irrelevant, or even dangerous, to that project" (166). Moreover, Reid-Pharr cogently discusses the politics of "the nation" (and here, the black nation largely writ could be said to have been collapsed under the sign of the "Nation" of Islam since Farrakhan was the instigator of the March) as embodied by the March as black as heterosexual, and as exclusive of women. Like the aforementioned critics of a black nationalism that is invested in a disciplining and policing of sexuality and gender, Reid-Pharr reads the politics of the march as bound to the same homophobic and sexist logic that has often been an undeniable aspect of black nationalism. He argues, "For, if the definition of blackness hinges on heterosexuality, then either blackness and homosexuality are [sic] incommensurable (and black gays are not really black) or the notion of blackness is untenable, as witnessed by the large numbers of black gay men" (167).

As Reid-Pharr continues, contemporary queer thought renders void the idea that black and queer are mutually exclusive terms. Contemporary queer theorists do well to study race and sexuality. What I seek to examine here is the way in which a critique of black nationalism does not necessarily move one past the nationalist moment. I am calling for a queering of black nationalism that stretches and bends the limits of nationalism so that it can include those identities and subjects it theoretically views as outlaw. I begin with an invocation of Reid-Pharr's essay because, while he ably unpacks the problematic aspects of the rhetoric of the Million Man March, he ends by observing, "Here, then, despite the regressive racial and gender politics that framed the Million Man March, there were countless improvisational moments of transcendence" (175). Reid-Pharr's consideration of the Million Man March is not an under-valuation and dismissal of the event based on its predictably anachronistic political implications. Rather, Reid-Pharr's essay participates in an emerging trend at "queer" sites that not only calls into question black nationalism's heterosexism, but also, and perhaps most importantly, seeks to invade it, to subvert and deconstruct the logic of nationalism by occupying its space. These renegotiations of nationalism traverse the boundary of the "almost not quite" that opens a previously closed space for once excluded identities. The focus of my essay here is the emergence of such "improvisational moments of transcendence" in queer discourses that remake, renegotiate, and revamp nationalism (175).

As my epigraphs from Coco Fusco and Sterling Stuckey suggest, many critics are loathe to dismiss black nationalism. Their disinterestedness in dismissing black nationalism is due, in large part, to the persistence of racism: a nation horribly scarred by tragedies of race unsurprisingly embodies some members who find relevant a discourse that figures itself as overturning and opposing racism. Persistent American racism means that in US queer discourses, "race emerges unscathed. Indeed, blackness has been bolstered, insofar as we were all forced [at the Million Man March and, as I argue here, at other "black" sites], at least those of us who are black and otherwise, to scurry for cover under the great black mantle, to fly our colors" (Reid-Pharr 167). The appeal of Black nationalism, which cannot be severed from its problematic, then, is rooted in a complicated set of needs and aversions.