Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

echoes a fundamental conceptual term in Park's sociological writings: "social control.' The most significant parallel for my purposes, however, is that both figures hold a romantic racialist view of the black ram that identifies it with femininity.

9 See also Ellison, "Recent." His critique of this aesthetic movement prefigures the main argument in Huggins's account, which emphasizes the adverse effects of white patronage on the quality of the work produced.

10 Certain details in Ellison's depiction of Young Emerson suggest that this character is partially modeled on the figure of Charles Van Vechten, an influential sponsor of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Both figures are gay, share an erotic interest in black men, and are collectors of exotic objects. For accounts of Van Vechten's role in this literary movement, his writing and his overall flamboyance, see Huggins (93-136) and Douglas (28892

11 Critics have generally focused more on this character's name than his homosexuality. An exception to this pattern is NadeL who argues that Ellison, through his portrayal of Young Emerson, is engaging with and seeking to overturn Fiedler's interpretation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While Nadel thus addresses the homosexuality of Emerson, his main concern is with the intertextuality of Invisible Man.

12 While no locale is explicitly specified certain details suggest that this encounter takes place in the South. The narrator confirms Mary's assertion that that he had to "run a long ways" after this encounter, and adds that he Shopped them freight trains and everything^ in fleeing (256). The narrator is, moreover, seeking to explain to Mary how he got to this Northern hospital from "down homeS (247). Finally, the white man uses Southern phrases like "boy" or "mammy" (254-56)..

13 Edelman offers an extremely intriguing account of this conflation of blackness end femininity in racist de He notes that the epistemological machinery devoted to discerning racial difference pries the visual register. This suggests, according to Edelman, "a borrowing from-and a repositioning of-the scopic logic on which the prior on of sexual difference depends" (46). He thus concludes that "[r]acial" discrimination, in both sense of the word ... is propped up on or, as Freud might put it, occupies an anaclitic relation to, the privileging of the scopic drive in the psychic structuring of sexual difference" (46).

14 Another area for further inquiry would be to explore the relationship between the forms of white male violence that are directed at black men and those tat an directed et black women, For analyses of white male/black female sexualized violence and its representation, see Davis, hooks, and Spiller

15 Edelman offers an important theoretical analysis of the disturbing linkage of and-racist critique and homophobia in AfricanAmerican writing. My own work has been greatly aided by Edelman's. He offers (among other things) a highly sophisticated account of the various figural logics encoded within homophobic conceptions of the male homosexual, an account that helps to explain the disturbing ease with which the figure of the gay man can come to symbolize the "terrorizing force of white racism" (55).