Writing manhood in black and yellow : Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the literary politics of identity
This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color -- a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation. The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote -- a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other
Print Book, English, 2005
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2005
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xxviii, 286 pages ; 24 cm.
9780804751087, 9780804751094, 0804751080, 0804751099
58791133
Invisible desires: homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Invisible Man
Blueprints for negro manhood: Ellison and the vernacular
The legacy of Fu Manchu: Orientalist desire and the figure of the Asian "homosexual"
"Shells of the dead": the melancholy of masculine desire
The fantasy of a yellow vernacular: mimetic hunger and the "chameleon Chinaman."