USA Africa Dialogue Series - Once You Go Black

Once You Go Black:
Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr
Subjects: Gender Studies, Race & Ethnicity
Part of the Sexual Cultures Series
2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, LGBT Studies
http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=592

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.

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