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MICHAEL UEBEL
Identity politics has emerged i n the past few years as the contemporary c r i t i -
cal watchword. Recent special issues o f New Formations, Critical Inquiry, October,
and diacritics,' along w i t h a proliferating number o f essays and books, at-
test to the explosion of interest i n the politics o f identity. Drawing on the
critical methods o f gender studies, queer studies, film studies, ethnography,
and studies o f colonialism, identity politics scrutinizes the effects o f cultural
forces on identities and the forms i n w h i c h identities are imagined. It de-
scribes a historical approach to subjectivity, attentive to the ways we under-
stand individuals as products o f a field o f determinants, at once psychic,
institutional, interracial, bodily, homoerotic, homosocial, aesthetic, rhetori-
cal, national. It deconstructs the opposition between the social and the psy-
chic by obliging us, as Kaja Silverman famously puts i t , "to approach history
always through the refractions o f desire and identification, and to read race
and class insistently i n relation to sexuality" and gender (Male Subjectivity 300).
And, most significantly, identity politics opens the way for describing identi-
ncatory practices as well as their products, for delineating ongoing processes
as well as "final" meanings.^
The present collection, subtended by the discourses and strategies of iden-
dty politics, debates the meanings o f identities and the ethical questions
attending them from a relatively focused critical perspective. I n order to
"Linderstand subjectivity as constituted by and constitutive of multiple posi-
::ons, the contributors locate the subject at the intersection o f race and mas-
2 Michael Uebel
ing beyond the cultures they organize. But, o f course, denying the cultural
autonomy o f whiteness, by asserting its particularity, does not amount to
ignoring the power o f its "autonomy-effects" —the ways i n w h i c h it appears
as a generality Thus Richard Dyer, i n his essay on the coupling o f bodybuild-
ing and colonialism, contends that white masculinities must be understood
as historically specific constructions at the same time that they are recog-
nized i n their generality. " I t is," he writes, "the ability to pass themselves
off as not particular that allows them to go on being, w i t h i n the regime o f
representation that they produce, 'invisible'" (289; this volume). Theorizing
identity-from-above, then, necessitates an attention to the interplay o f racial
masculine particularities and generalities.
The criticism o f racial masculinity in this volume thus demands this strate-
gic assertion: that the opposition between identity-from-above and identity-
from-below is a false one. The essays collected here reformulate this oppo-
sition as a vital, not always amiable, dialogue. Delineating the dominant
or privileged depends upon analyzing the marginalized or colonized —and
vice versa. As Christopher Looby, Eric Lott, and Gayle Wald demonstrate,
whiteness is complexly structured by fantasies o f blackness; and, as Herman
Beavers argues, definitions o f black masculine identity crucially hinge on
investments i n white male identity. Such interdependence shows that the for-
mation o f masculine identity is never strictly, so to speak, a black-and-white
issue. The essays collectively refuse to suppress the crossing and uncrossing
of central issues o f race by the heterogeneity o f masculine sex/gender inter-
ests and class/ethnic identities: Leerom Medovoi understands 19505 youth
culture i n terms o f its masculinist challeiige to the racial, generational, and
class hegemonies o f white America; Eric Lott reads Elvis impersonators as a
reclamation o f working-class machismo; Jonathan Dollimore argues for the
political force o f crossing lines o f racial and sexual difference; and Yvonne
Tasker interrogates Hong Kong and American martial arts films for what they
reveal about nationahst and homoerotic mascuUne identifications.
Folding identity-from-above into identity-from-below, and vice versa,
constitutes a refusal to reauthorize the historically and culturally dominant —
whiteness, masculinity, straightness —a refusal that is not necessarily redu-
cible to an opposition to the entangling o f whiteness w i t h blackness, mascu-
linity w i t h femininity, straightness w i t h queerness. This volume attempts to
dieorize the dominant without endorsing, replicating, or valorizing i t . Re-
sponding to the need for theorizing dominance, the collection seeks a way
out o f and beyond the d o m i n i o n o f identities-from-above: here it is precisely
± e "above" that is held for questioning. I n the context o f American history,
4 Michael Uebel
as several contributors make clear, and i n the recent context o f pop singers
Marky Mark or Vanilla Ice, the supersession o f whiteness entailed ways into
blackness. Yet "abolishing" whiteness is often only appropriation o f and v i o -
lence to blackness. A critical look at whiteness, enabled theoretically by a
critical black perspective, not only w i l l suggest that whiteness, too, is socially
constructed (and therefore deconstructible), but also w i l l condemn the d o m i -
nance it risks erecting and concealing. Looby's and Dollimore's essays move
toward a liberation from the dominance o f whiteness through sexuality, an
overcoming o f race through same-sex desire. Lott's essay creates a space for
the possibility o f dismantling dominance through practices o f imperson-
ation, where claims o f whiteness or class in relation to Elvis are always up
for grabs. These essays insist on the links between practice and theory, as they
try to push theory into its local, historical domain.
"Practice," Gilles Deleuze postulated, "is a set o f relays from one theoretical
point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory
can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary
for piercing this w a l l " (206). Together, the theories o f raciahzed masculinities
i n this volume evoke practices aimed at transgressing the confining hmits o f
theorizing only identities-from-above. Masculinity comes to designate a whole
range o f cultural forms and practices, and our use o f the multiplex category
masculinities i n the title o f this essay and volume signals our wish to account for
the local diversities o f the subject. The category masculinities is not meant to be
a stable consolidation o f historically specific subject-positions or a collective
term for masculinity, but a polysemy denying the autonomy and stability o f
male identity as it claims to specify and interpret masculine self-perception,
performativity, and existence. The term brings into play the recognition o f the
profound multiplicity and conchtional status o f the historical experience o f
male subjects. Masculinity becomes not the defining quality o f men, o f their
fantasies and real experiences o f self and other, but one coordinate o f their
identity that exists i n a constant dialectical relation w i t h other coorchnates.
This dialectical constructionist view o f racial and gender subjectivities d i -
rectly challenges the dominant view o f popular culture, described by Philip
Cohen as "the mere effect o f a collision between dominant and subordinate
ideologies, or some kind o f open space where chscourses circulate" ("Tarzan"
25), merely to consolidate and invigorate a hegemonic discourse. Far from
positing a static model o f culture that forecloses the possibility o f political
progress, the contributors inscribe racial masculine existence and imagina-
tion w i t h i n popular cultures that are constantly shifting the meanings that tra-
chtionally ground them. I n the active production o f new meanings, alliances
Men i n Color 5
ject is intensely ambivalent, poised between desire and fear, incitement and
interdiction, mastery and anxiety.
Offering an incisive analysis o f the psychomachia inherent i n the posi-
tion o f mastery, Christopher Looby reads the memoir o f Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, white commander o f an all-black U n i o n Army regiment during
the Civil War, i n order to lay bare the sublimated fantasies inflecting his ca-
maraderie w i t h , and love for, his soldiers. Looby shows how Higginson's
cross-racial identification depends on a logic o f recognition and disavowal:
the commander acknowledges his "racial envy" at the same time as he sani-
tizes his fetish objects under an aestheticizing gaze. Higginson thus retains the
sovereignty o f whiteness while indulging i n a fantasy o f blackness. Looby's
reading complements Gayle Wald's i n underscoring the social and psycho-
logical ramifications o f "loving blackness," * and, further, joins Richard Dyer's
and Eric Lott's readings to address the conflictive construction and symbolic
value o f white masculinity.
The symbolic or metaphoric values o f racial masculinities are rarely static.
Several essays converge on a reading o f racial masculinities as unstable icons
marking mobile, shifting positionahties. The essays o f Jose Mufioz, Gayle
Wald, Harry Stecopoulos, Eric Lott, and Christopher Looby highlight the
complex, culturally contingent construction o f racial masculine identities as
a function o f not always coherent processes o f self-fashioning. Mufioz reads
Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston and its allusions to the homoerotic photo-
graphs o f Mapplethorpe and Van Der Zee as constructing shifting fantasies
and communal identities against the social background o f not only white,
but heterosexist, supremacies i n the age o f A I D S . Wald analyzes the career o f
white jazz musician, hipster, and self-styled "voluntary Negro" Mezz Mezz-
row, revealing how his racial passing is irrevocably coupled w i t h mobile
erotic, masculine, and aesthetic identifications. Stecopoulos explores the way
i n w h i c h turn-of-the-century white middle-class American men used "raced"
cultural fantasies to prop up both their class identity and their sense o f man-
hood during times o f professional and financial failure. Stecopoulos demon-
strates h o w texts such as the best-selling Tarzan of the Apes (1914) offer imperial
fantasies o f racial supremacy aimed at tenuously "resolving" moments o f
white male middle-class self-doubt by means o f an uneasy fascination w i t h
and appropriation o f black male physicality.
Discussing the symbolic value o f racial identity, Richard Dyer and Herman
Beavers turn to the gendered, raced body for its disclosures about the machin-
ery o f racism and colonialism. For both contributors, the racial male body
manifests contradictory discursive practices and power investments. Dyer's
Men i n Color 7
richly suggestive reading o f the white male body i n Italian peplum films o f
the late 19SOS and early 1960s treats skin color and muscle-contoured bodies
as expressions o f control, signifiers o f colonial hegemony, where power de-
rives from the simultaneous staging and transcending o f hierarchies. The
white male hero reigns supreme at the same time as he supersedes the system
he rules; his power is at once particular and nonspecific, above the particu-
lar. I n this way the hero can be hypermasculine and suprahuman, white and
strikingly tanned, a conqueror o f both primitive, non-white men and futur-
istic machine technology. At the heart o f these paradoxical conditions. Dyer
suggests, lies "perhaps the secret o f all power."
Though the mechanism o f power, the means by w h i c h racial masculini-
ties signify specifically and unrestrictedly (invisibly), is transcultural —"the
secret o f all power" —the forms that it takes are culturally specific. Beavers i n -
vestigates the "secret" o f Eddie Murphy's power as a troubling icon o f racial
progress by situating his "coolness" —as sign o f rehef, control, and transgres-
s i o n — i n the political context o f racism, homophobia, and misogyny. He also
situates Murphy's dialectical, cool pose i n relation to Richard Pryor's radical
appropriation o f cool as a way o f restoring the African American male "body
in pain." Murphy's persona —consistent whether he plays himself or a char-
acter—allows h i m , like the heroic peplum bodybuilder, to cross the fixed
hues o f racial identity. Transcending the limits o f race and body, Murphy and
Pryor can reclaim, even transform, black experience.
In Robin D. G. Kelley's reading o f Malcolm X's autobiographical account o f
his teenage years, the male body w i t h its "fashionable ghetto adornments,"
to use Malcolm's o w n words, constitutes a forceful assertion o f race, class,
and gender prerogative. Malcolm's teenage years, Kelley suggests, coincided
w i t h a system o f wartime cultural pohtics i n w h i c h the cool hipster subcul-
rore o f black males molded, for some, new identities relatively free o f the
constraints o f patriotic fervor and petit bourgeois morality. The zoot suit,
the conk, and the moves and language o f the "hep cat" signified the ability to
demystify the dominant ideology while remaining tied to it through gestures
of appropriation. Recasting the male body and the ways it signifies is above
a l l a pohtical enterprise, aimed at producing new sohdarities and exposing
the bounds o f the dominant and " n o r m a l " as fragile and subject to revision.
By mapping identities i n terms o f colonial fantasy and the iconography
c: racial masculine bodies, theoretical models emerge that are aimed at sup-
•nlanting reductive accounts o f identity formation at the intersection o f race
and masculinity. Critical paradigms that merely figure ambivalent fantasies o f
identification and the symbolic value o f male racial bodies reproduce a false
8 Michael Uebel
Notes
This essay (done i n 1993) owes a great deal, except its imperfections, to the generosity
and intellectual support o f the f o l l o w i n g colleagues: John Foster, Deborah M c D o w e l l ,
Nick Frankel, Eric Lott, Laura Sanchez, Vance Smith, and Debra Morris.
1. See New Formations 5 (1988); Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992); October 61 (summer
1992); and diacritics 24 (summer-fall 1994).
2. The end o f this paragraph calls for a footnote i n the f o r m o f a "pocket b i b l i o g -
raphy" o f w r i t i n g s o n identity politics. Such a bibliography w o u l d not fit here, and
probably need not since m u c h o f the w o r k o n identity politics is already absorbed into
the critical mainstream. To take a shortcut, I refer the reader to the "references," "sug-
gestions for further reading," "bibliography," and "notes" sections o f the f o l l o w i n g
collections: Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, eds.. Cultural Studies; Ashcroft, Griffiths,
and Tiffin, eds.. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader; Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, eds., The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet; Queer Politics and Social Theory.
3. Here a cursory list must include Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature; A
Vernacular Theory; Gates, The Signifying Monkey; A Theory of African American Literary Criticism;
Nero, "Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying i n Contemporary Black Gay Litera-
ture"; Lott, " 'The Seeming Counterfeit': Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy"
and Love and Theft; Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics"; Toop, The Rap Attack; African Jive
to New York Hip Hop; Spencer, ed.. The Emergence of Rap and the Emergence of Black; and Rose,
Black Noise.
4. Those w r i t i n g w i t h i n the present-day politics o f identity insist o n the value
o f identity as a strategic term. Confining the term to its provisional use i n order t o
complicate and question comprehensive, formulaic paradigms and to challenge their
political validity, the politics o f identity envisions the disenchanting o f identity and
its traditional forms o f calculation. For example, Judith Butler prefers "to think about
the invocation o f identity as a strategic provisionality, using the t e r m , but k n o w i n g
when to let it go, living its contingency, and subjecting i t to a political challenge con-
cerning its usefulness" ("Discussion" n o ) . And Stanley A r o n o w i t z writes: "A solution
[to the problem o f needing a generalized theoretical discourse o f identity] is to offer
theoretical formulations as strategic" ("Reflections" 103). I n this spirit o f disenchant-
ment, Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr, i n their editors' i n t r o d u c t i o n to
the "Identities" issue o f Critical Inquiry, view identity politics as an emergent critique
o f the "cliche-ridden" (62^) critical discourses o f the 1980s and their 1990s incarna-
Men i n Color 13
cions, discourses ruled by the triumvirate Race, Class, and Gender. The same spirit o f
disenchantment informs this collection o f essays.
£. This treatment o f identity i n general —racial maleness specifically —harmonizes
w e l l w i t h Joan W. Scott's recent call for the historicization o f identities as a way o f
shifting the emphasis o f political correctness, from a n o t i o n o f stable identity as a
cause o f difference and discrimination to a n o t i o n o f unstably proximate identities
that are the "never-secured effect o f a process o f enunciation o f cultural difference"
( " M u k i c u l t u r a l i s m " 19). Scott continues; " i t makes more sense to teach our students
and tell ourselves that identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is am-
biguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that
subjects are produced through m u l t i p l e identifications, some o f w h i c h become p o l i t i -
cally salient for a time i n certain contexts, and that the project o f history is not to
rectify identity but to understand its p r o d u c t i o n as an ongoing process o f differen-
tiation, relentless i n its repetition, but also —and this seems to me the i m p o r t a n t
political point—subject to redefinition, resistance, and change" (19).
6. See Butler, Gender Trouble 1-25; Bodies That Matter 1-23; and "Critically Queer."
7. See, for starters, Fanon, Block Skin, White Masks; Bhabha, "The Other Question: The
Stereotype and Colonial Discourse" and " O f M i m i c r y and Man; The Ambivalence o f
Colonial Discourse"; Mercer and Julien, "Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity;
.\; Mercer, "Skin Head Sex Thing; Racial Difference and the Homoerotic
Imaginary"; and Silverman, " W h i t e Skin, B r o w n Masks: The Double Mimesis, or W i t h
lawTence i n Arabia."
8. "Loving blackness," bell hooks reminds us i n Black Looks, cuts t w o ways: as revo-
-Uiionary intervention, it decolonizes our minds, transmuting self-hatred and the
devaluing o f racial difference under w h i t e supremacy into the political resistance o f
self-love; as appropriation and fetishization o f black culture, it commodifies differ-
ence as capital, objectifying cultural difference and perpetuating racism (see hooks.
Black Looks 9-20).
9. As Nietzsche put it i n On the Genealogy of Morals, "there is no 'being' behind doing,
e j e c t i n g , becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed —the deed is
everything" (4^; qtd. i n Butler, Gender Trouble 25).
10. Here, the idea o f a "politics o f representation" follows that o f Stuart Hall, w h i c h
I have paraphrased (see Hall, "New Ethnicities" 27).
: i . I b o r r o w the term from Diana Fuss's essay, "Fashion and the Homospectatorial
l o o k , " on the lesbian-looks encoded i n women's fashion photography and adver-
zsmg, homoerotic looks theorized generally " i n terms o f a visual structuring and
Identification that participates i n organizing the sexual identity o f any social object"
736).
:2. I am applying here Stuart Hall's definition o f cultural identity ("a matter o f
r e c o m i n g ' as w e l l as ' b e i n g ' " ) from his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" to
Harpham's n o t i o n o f ethics conceived o f as "a necessary, and necessarily impure and
14 Michael Uebel
unsystematic, mediation between unconscious or instinctual life and its cognitive and
cultural transformation" (i8).
13. The idea o f an ethics o f performativity traces its origins to Aristotle's Nicoma-
chean Ethics, Book I , Chapter 7 (1098a ^ff.), where an analogy is drawn between man's
relation to living the good life and a lyre-player's relation to playing the lyre w e l l .
Happiness, the good life, depends on performance, a n o t i o n that has been called Aris-
totle's "starting-point for ethical e n q u i r y " (Maclntyre ^8). See Aristotle 943.
14. The issue o f the compatibility o f the dual interventionist commitments i n con-
temporary cultural studies —the goals o f describing real conditions o f existence and
transforming them i n the name o f a less oppressive, more just society —is critiqued
by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Laurie Anne W h i t t from the standpoint o f postmoder-
nity and ecologically informed criticism. Slack and W h i t t rightly contend that w i t h i n
cultural studies the end or destination o f such interventionist commitments goes u n -
articulated and unspecified. I w o u l d like to suggest that inserting and emphasizing
the performative basis o f ethics w i t h i n discussions o f race and masculinities, or the
objects o f cultural studies more generally, moves toward specifying what they call
"the normative bases o f [cultural theorists'] theory and practice" (572).