Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

208 Pages·2008·7.6 MB·English

Dilution Anxiety
and the Black Phallus
Margo Natalie Crawford
The OhiO STaTe UNiverSiTy PreSS / Columbus
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Copyright © 2008 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crawford, Margo Natalie.
Dilution anxiety and the black phallus / Margo Natalie Crawford.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8142–5168–3 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8142–1091–8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.
American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Human skin color in literature.
3. Politics and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Human skin color—United
States—Psychological aspects. 5. Human skin color—Social aspects—United States. 6. Race
awareness in literature. 7. Race in literature. 8. Race relations in literature. 9. Miscegenation in
literature. 10. Body, Human, in literature. 11. Difference (Psychology) in literature. I. Title.
PS228.S57C73 2008
810.9'3552—dc22
2008015056
This book is available in the following editions:
Cloth (ISBN 978–0–8142–1091–8)
Paper (ISBN 978–0–8142–5168–3)
CD-ROM (ISBN 978–0–8142–9171–9)
Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas.
Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe.
Type set in Adobe Minion Pro.
Printed by Thomson Shore, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate-
rials. ANSI Z39.48–1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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list of illustrations  / v
acknowledgments  / vii
introduction  /  1
one 
“She Should have Been a Boy”: Shades of Blackness in
Three Lives and The Blacker the Berry  / 23
two
The Fantasy and Fear of Dilution in Absalom, Absalom!  / 43
three
The Black arts Phallus  / 62
four
The Surreal aesthetic and the Sticky racial Fetish: The Bluest Eye
and Tar Baby  / 90
five
Skin Color Geographies in Paradise  / 112
six  
The Critique of Dilution anxiety in Sent for You Yesterday  / 135
epilogue
Post-Dilution anxiety  / 167
notes  / 177
works cited  / 191
index  / 197
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Figure 1 
Segregated public restrooms (© D’azi Productions)  / 9
Figure 2 
Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness (Carol Barnes, 1988)  / 15
Figure 3 
The Blacker the Berry (Wallace Thurman, 1970)  / 18
Figure 4 
Die Nigger Die! (h. rap Brown, 1969)   / 67
Figure 5 
“The Middle Passage” (Bob Crawford, 1968)  / 77
Figure 6 
“Beauty Culture” (Bob Crawford, 1967)  / 78
Figure 7 
“Culture” (Bob Crawford, 1969)  / 79
Figure 8 
Untitled (Bob Crawford, 1969)  / 83
Figure 9 
“Wigs” (Bob Crawford, 1970)  / 83
Figure 10
“Batman” (Bob Crawford, 1969)  / 84
v
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vi illustrations
Figure 11
Glenn Ligon, Warm Broad Glow (2005). Neon, paint; 36 x 192 inches, 91.4 x
487.7 cm. a.P. 1/2; ed. of 7 (Courtesy regen Projects, Los angeles)   / 171
Figure 12 
2006 advertisement  / 175
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The book gained wings during my graduate studies at Yale Univer-
sity with the invaluable guidance of Margaret Homans and Robert
Stepto. I thank them for the type of dialogue and feedback that greatly
enriched every layer of this project. At Yale, Laura Wexler taught a seminar,
“Photography and the Body,” that propelled my initial work with Black
Arts movement photography. Her excitement about Bob Crawford’s photo-
graphs greatly encouraged me. Richard Brodhead provided superb insight
on the contradictions that Faulkner crystallizes. At Yale, seminars taught
by Margaret Homans, Vera Kutzinski, Hazel Carby, Sara Suleri, Michael
Denning, Michael Holquist, Bryan Wolf, and James Szwed provided a
wealth of new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking. I thank Wai Chee
Dimock for a reading of the dissertation that foregrounded the metaques-
tions and helped immensely as I moved to the Black Arts movement and
Black Power movement as a pivot point in this story about images of black
bodies.
During the middle life of the writing of this book, Lisa Gail Collins and
I coedited New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers 2006). As
we worked on that project, many parts of this book were nurtured. I thank
Lisa Collins for being such a kindred spirit. The annual James A. Porter
Colloquium on African American Art, held in the art history department
at Howard University and organized by Floyd Coleman, has offered lively
and engaging feedback. The 2006 Porter Colloquium provided a rare focus
on both the literature and the visual culture of the Black Arts movement.
Houston A. Baker, Jr. has been a consummate mentor. I have deep grati-
tude for his sense of the “Sade tones.”
vii
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viii acknowledgments
I thank Sonia Sanchez for telling me at the 2004 MLA conference to
“continue doing exactly what you’re doing.” I first met Kimberly Benston at
a 2006 conference on Larry Neal at Brooklyn College. His encouragement
has been precious. Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking work has been a
bridge over troubled waters. I thank Jacqueline Goldsby for hearing what I
was saying at the exact moment when I needed to be sure that it was being
heard and for being an exemplary model of the black feminist scholar.
At Indiana University, George Hutchinson has offered the type of gen-
uine support and camaraderie that often made all the difference. Many
conversations with Trica Keaton have simply sustained me. I am very
grateful to Purnima Bose for her insight and rare generosity.
Many others have provided that necessary dialogue and vital inspira-
tion: Haki Madhubuti, Cheryl Clarke, Olaf Berwald, Lewis Gordon, Wil-
liam Van Deburg, James Mumford, Quincy Troupe, Cathy Bowman, Cheryl
Wall, Eleanor Traylor, John Bowles, Bennie Johnson, Mae Henderson,
James Smethurst, Radhika Parameswaran, Amor Kohli, Dwight McBride,
Jennifer De Vere Brody, Mike Sell, Uma Narayan, Wendy Graham, Pat
Brantlinger, Salah Hassan, John McCluskey, Audrey McCluskey, Michelle
Wright, Evie Shockley, Howard Rambsy, Valerie Grim, Joyce Joyce, Vivian
Halloran, Badia Sahar Ahad, Esiaba Irobi, Komozi Woodard, Carter
Mathes, Wakisha Malone, Tiffany Mann, Tommy Lott, Aldon Nielsen, and
Ross Gay. Many of my graduate students have shared my passion for black
body politics. Some of the most fruitful exchanges have occurred with
Ursula McTaggart, Jackson Brown, Vanessa Reece, Clark Barwick, Kristen
Gentry, Aisha Sharif, and Asha French.
During the final stages of this book, Marta Caminero-Santangelo was
incredibly generous with her time and close reading. Her deep insight
and encouragement have greatly nurtured this book. Working with the
anonymous readers truly enhanced this book. Their engagement with the
material was a crucial part of the writing process. Sandy Crooms made
this book possible. I have been fortunate to have such an encouraging and
committed editor. Working with her was a sheer pleasure.
I give my deepest expressions of gratitude to my mother. Julio Finn, Bob
Crawford, Renee Arnold, Dagny Bloland, Anupama Rao, Tijuana Murray,
Karama Neal, Nikki Taylor, Darren Hutchinson, Vicki Bond, Joe Razza,
Paula Bryant, and my siblings remain ideal readers.
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WheN one of my students proposed that, in contemporary films
and Hip Hop culture, dark-skinned black men are now “in style,”
another student queried, “Is it because light-skinned men are ren-
dered effeminate?” This student then proposed that we should also think
about the relatively new use of “very” dark-skinned black female super-
models who sometimes look androgynous. The conversation then moved
to images of dark-skinned black female supermodels as one big black
phallic symbol. In a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, interviewees
connect Barack Obama’s brown-skinned wife and his ability to gain the
support of both middle-class and lower-class African American voters.
One interviewee states, “Many of our male celebrities, sports figures, they
marry white women or light-skinned wives. [ . . . ] We all see that on televi-
sion. But you turn on the TV and you see Michelle Obama and she looks
black. I can identify with her. [ . . . ] I can tell you this: He would have
a lot less votes if his wife were light-skinned or white.”1 Another inter-
viewee claims that Barack Obama “married up.” This language rewrites
the longstanding post-slavery script in which people “marry up” when a
light-skinned spouse becomes a type of racial uplift. In the Harlem Renais-
sance play Color Struck (1925), Zora Neale Hurston depicts a dark-skinned
female character’s inability to believe that any suitor would really prefer
her over a “high-yaller,” a light-skinned black woman. Her internalization
of this light-skinned preference ends her relationship with John, the char-
acter who, contrary to Emma’s assumptions, never displays any signs of
being “color struck.” When John returns to Emma after twenty years in

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 introduction
order to profess his never-ending love, he is surprised to find that the dark-
skinned Emma, who constantly accused him of secretly desiring “yellow”
women, is now the mother of a light-skinned “mulatta” child who is ill.
The father of this child is not present. Theatergoers (or readers) are led
to wonder if Emma, in her great frustration over light-skinned privilege,
decided that giving birth to a light-skinned child, even outside of wed-
lock, would increase her social status. This child, however, does not finally
redeem Emma’s dark-skinned blues. The child dies, in the final scene, when
Emma does not immediately contact the doctor because she fears leaving
John alone with her child and begins to see her child as yet another light-
skinned female threat to any possibility of a dark-skinned black woman’s
happiness.
These fictional and nonfictional accounts dramatize the need to ask
what is really at stake in the ongoing fetishism of shades of blackness (light-
skinned blackness and dark-skinned blackness). The fetishism of glowing
dark-skinned blackness often competes, within contemporary American
visual culture, with the longstanding fetishism of the light skin color of
the tragic mulatta. Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” is an apt
description of the fetishism of shades of blackness.2 Frantz Fanon, in Black
Skin, White Masks, contrasts the “dramatic” encounter between the white
person and the “Negro” who has no “ontological resistance” to the white
gaze and the nondramatic “little gulf that exists among the almost-white,
the mulatto, and the nigger” (110). Fanon explains, “I was satisfied with an
intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic”
(110). Twentieth-century American literature often makes this “little gulf”
“dramatic.” The term “colorism” is often used as a way of distinguishing
between the black and white color line and the intraracial dynamics of
lighter- and darker-skinned blackness. In American literary studies, col-
orism (the full spectrum of color fetishism, not only the fetishism of
lighter-skinned blackness) is just beginning to receive the attention that it
has gained in sociology and psychology.3 Gaining real momentum in the
1980s, there has been widespread interest, among sociologists and psy-
chologists, in the different experiences of black people with lighter and
darker skin.4 In this study, I turn to twentieth-century American literary
depictions of colorism.
After the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, colorism is
overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the
counter-fetishism of dark skin. These stories about colorism are often the
authors’ attempts to capture a collective post-slavery trauma that shapes
ways of seeing African American bodies.5 Images of the post-slavery
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