Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

By Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Book Overview

2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, LGBT Studies
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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814775845
• ISBN13: 9780814775844
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Reid-Pharr's best book to date

This is the long-awaited moment when Robert Reid-Pharr really 'lets his hair down' (not the best cliche for a black man) and demonstrates that he is so much more than an academic literary critic (and he does a damn fine job of that, mind you.) Signifying on that ancient but alive racist statement "Once you go black, you can never go back", so often heard by (gay and straight) whiteboys with a chronic case of jungle fever, Reid-Pharr moves breathlessly through the 'genres' of queer studies, black studies, critical whiteness work, and cultural studies. His position as a great American social and cultural critic is fully consolidated with this text. His prose is lucid; his style is engaging and any one of the essays/chapters here *should* and could be reprinted in any venue; from Essence to The New Yorker (if only!) and from The Village Voice to Harper's. One can only hope that this book will be sufficiently widely read that Reid-Pharr can become, for lack of a better comparison, the gay Michael Eric Dyson. Most significantly, for this reader, is that this book embodies the revolutionary impulse in black studies to at once reach an academic audience and also a mass, popular audience. In other words, this book should be in airport bookstores, not completely relegated to the sub-section of 'black masculinity studies' (to which it certainly makes an important contribution)