Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
"The Singing Man Who Must be Reckoned With": Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen
African American Review, Winter, 2000
While the black bourgeoisie was aware of such stereotyping and its potentially pernicious implications, they seemed to agree with the general assumption that racial and even national salvation lay in a clearly articulated masculine style. [6] Ransom's rhapsody on the black male is only one good example. But what that style should be was a point of some debate. The gaudy military plumage of the Garveyites? Or perhaps the crisp Victorianism of W. E. B. Du Bois with his cane, his moustache modeled after Germany's Wilhelm II, and his general air of urbane sophistication? Or perhaps the traditionally patriotic sharp lines of the 15th regiment on Fifth Avenue? The "primitivist" hedonism of the working-class clubs and cabarets celebrated by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay? Or perhaps even the proper Christian gentleman, of whom Cullen's adoptive father, Frederick Asbury Cullen, was one of the prime exemplars? All these embodied different masculine styles and indeed suggested different conceptions of blackness that African American men embraced or rejected in the quest for a route out from under the thumb of white America. Thus, much of the aesthetic work of the Harlem Renaissance turned not simply on the question of race but around the nexus of race and gender. From the sharp disagreements between Cullen and Hughes on the proper subject matter for poetry, to the late arguments between Hurston and Wright, the politics of race was also the politics of gender and sexuality. The cultural explosion of the twenties, which Cullen embodied for many African Americans, explores the tricky terrain in which the achievement of manhood is seen to be an achievement of racial self-realization.
Perhaps no poet was more vexed by the dilemma of his masculinity than Countee Cullen. Adopted out of an impoverished childhood, and perhaps illegitimacy, into the upper reaches of Harlem society by a Methodist minister, living a barely concealed gay life while still marrying Yolande Du Bois, Cullen embodied the contradictory social significance of varying masculine styles in his one body. Critics have documented Cullen's anguished bifurcation as a black man dedicated to a dream of Africa and to the intellectual traditions that he imbibed at Clinton DeWitt High School, NYU, and Harvard. In the balance of this essay, I suggest that the crucial and finally insurmountable problem of Cullen's poetry is found not simply in this intellectual problem, but in the problem of his male body, centered as it is at the nexus of several contradictory masculine styles. Because these styles provoked what must have seemed to Cullen to be mutually exclusive desires, none could be affirmed save at the expense of self-mutilation. The most critical of these styles--which I would describe loosely as that of the Christian public servant and the gay lover--brought Cullen's desire for public service, approbation, and racial leadership into conflict with his desire for love and sexual fulfillment.
To some degree, Cullen was aware of all this, as his oft-quoted statement that he could not resolve a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination makes clear. However, the implications of this conflict for Cullen's quandaries concerning masculine sexuality and race have yet to be fully explored. Critics often note the conflict between Cullen's Africanist longings and his attachment to white traditions, but no one has noted that in Cullen's work "paganism" stands primarily as a marker for erotic desire, a movement toward an object of love or erotic experience rather than a search for origins. For Cullen this "inclination" or desire was primarily gay. [7] We can thus see the irony of Cullen's position as a man with longings for other men who would become an exemplar of the race by writing poetry. This poetry often evokes an eroticism associated with blackness, which must have often evoked in Cullen his private homoerotic desires, desires which did not clearly fit the heroic black male image embodied by Jack Johnson and the soldiers of the 15th regiment, or even of the Christian public servant embodied by his father and Reverdy Ransom. All of this at least implies that the assertion of blackness and maleness, for Cullen, must potentially have asserted homoerotic desire, the frank revelation and indulgence of which could only have served to diminish his position as a poet laureate. "What is Africa to me?" Indeed.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Arts
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »