A Taste for Brown Bodies
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A Taste for Brown Bodies

Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Pérez

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A Taste for Brown Bodies

Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Pérez

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About This Book

Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Awardpresented byLambda Literary
Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence. Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the “birth” of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Pérez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Anne Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—Pérez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9781479889198

1

The Queer Afterlife of Billy Budd

A habitually nostalgic identificatory mode defines the gay cosmopolitan imagination, staging exotic mise en scènes vital to the emergence and perpetuity of gay modernity and its collusions with U.S. empire. Throughout this study, I refer to the “brown” body in order, among other reasons, to signal the fluidity and racial ambiguity at work in the way a gay cosmopolitan imagines an idealized primitive figure that functions both as an object of desire and as the repository of disowned projections cast temporally and spatially backward. However, in framing my analysis, especially in returning to new historicist arguments that trace the origins of a modern gay male identity to the late nineteenth century, I find myself continually thinking about blondness—odd, considering my emphasis on the brown body and exoticist or primitivist fantasies. If we follow Eve Sedgwick in privileging Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray as foundational gay texts, it is the image of youthful blond beauty that is celebrated and not that of the dusky exotic. My contention is that blondness figures in these foundational texts as a queer proxy for primitiveness. Dorian Gray and Billy Budd each activate an atavistic desire within their respective narratives, each perpetuating the fantasy of child savage, one cynical and the other naïve. Dorian’s cynical primitivism is mediated through the novel’s orientalism, while Billy’s naïve primitivism requires the surrogacy of an African double, a mechanism consistent with what Toni Morrison has termed the Africanist presence in U.S. literature, characteristic in particular of the American Renaissance.1
I focus in this chapter on Melville’s novella because of its remarkable queer afterlife in adaptation, across diverse media and national boundaries, including a novel by Jean Genet, which then inspires Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film by the same title, Querelle, an opera by Benjamin Britten (with libretto by E. M. Forster), Claire Denis’s visually stunning film Beau Travail, which in turn inspires the pornographic video Legionnaires (directed by Jean-Marc Prouveur of Oh Man! Studios), and numerous pop culture citations, including a song by former Smiths frontman and international gay icon, Morrissey. By linking forms of gay male sociality, their mediations, and their histories to the notion of cosmopolitanism, I follow Neville Hoad’s proviso for queer historiography: “it should not be possible to understand the initial theories of modern male homosexual identity in the west without looking at the imperial and neo-imperial contexts of such theoretical productions” (133). Billy Budd and The Picture of Dorian Gray both present examples of what Hoad has described as the “endlessly displaceable national and racial origins of homosexuality” (139).
In her groundbreaking study The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick famously classifies fictional works by Melville, Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Henry James as the “foundational texts of modern gay male identity.” Attending to the binary play between the visible and invisible that undergirds her study, Sedgwick mentions the “international bond” among these texts (Billy Budd and The Picture of Dorian Gray in particular) as an important quality “efface[d]” by “canonic regimentation.” However, Sedgwick treats the “international canvas” from which modern gay male identity emerges as a historical accident, symptomatically occluded by the requisite nationalism of canon formation in the humanities. I offer, alternatively, that same international canvas as itself a catalyst for newly mobile desires and newly eroticized encounters. The international flow of both fictional narratives and reader markets charts the field for a newly cathected sensibility since designated as “modern” and “gay.”
Rather than taking for granted the coincidence of these two categories—“modern” and “gay”—I wish to consider what material conditions produce this conjunction. In part, I propose the figure of the primitive as an invisible component of the modern gay, reading the representations of Billy Budd and Dorian Gray as peculiar blond primitives and objects of disowned, racialized desire.
“Gay cosmopolitan” here designates a subject position beginning with (but not limited to) a white, urban, leisure-class gay male whose desire becomes globalized at the close of the nineteenth century. I hypothesize that the modern gay male identity often traced to sexology’s late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan locus instrumental to colonial and neocolonial expansion. In her book Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar identifies “homonationalism” as the “successes of queer incorporation into the domains of consumer markets and social recognition in the post–civil rights, late twentieth-century” (xii). I also look to locate the homosexual in the life of the nation but argue that such analysis needs to begin not in the 1990s but perhaps in the 1890s or even earlier, with a reexamination of the emergence of a modern gay male identity and the scholarship on that emergence.2 Rather than taking for granted the coincidence of “modern” and “gay,” I inquire into what material conditions make this conjunction viable. I return to critical studies like Sedgwick’s Epistemology and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1 (originally published in French in 1976) in order to reconsider the place of new mobilities (such as packaged travel) and new visual technologies (such as the cinema) vis-à-vis the birth of modern gay identity, traced to 1870 by Foucault and to 1891 by Sedgwick. (Of course, neither critic is interested in fixing a date, and these years are for each writer important historically yet to some degree arbitrary, the jumping off points for speculative genealogies more than indices of hard historicity.)
Taking as a starting point John D’Emilio’s argument that capitalism creates conditions for a homosexual identity by staging (through wage labor) new spaces for socialization outside the family, I consider how homosexual desire circulates, not fortuitously but instrumentally, within the erotic economies of both capitalism and the nation. Rather than imagining the late Victorian invention of homosexuality singularly as a moment of abjection, I posit the homosexual as a modern agent of neocolonial expansion.
As a merchant mariner during wartime, Billy Budd occupies a markedly unstable position, neither civilian nor soldier, but something in between or in flux. With much of Melville’s fiction, the ship is a site of cosmopolitan intercourse, peculiar for its extranational liminality and its constant literal navigation of/through national and international laws and domains. Merchant vessels, such as the one where we first encounter Billy, operate under a kind of mercenary nationalism, adopting what are known as “flags of convenience” in order to secure the most favorable economic conditions available within a world economy. (And it is in part this internationalism that Claire Denis seizes upon when she adapts Melville’s seafaring story to the circumstance of French Foreign Legionnaires.) Yet, despite this fast and loose play with nationality and state allegiance (exacerbated by Billy’s status as an orphan), Billy’s ship is a part of the British merchant fleet, making it and its crew auxiliary subjects of the British naval force. Hence, Billy finds himself impressed for military service, removed from the English merchant vessel, the Rights-of-Man, and enlisted onto the man-of-war HMS Bellipotent. The names of the two ships, punctuated by Billy Budd’s jovial bid farewell as he disembarks the merchant vessel, “And goodbye to you, too, old Rights-of-Man” (49), have, of course, invited endless allegorical interpretation, which I won’t rehearse here other than to recall Thomas Paine’s text of that title, the significance of its doctrine of inherent, natural rights to human rights discourse, hence, notions of global governance, and, within the narrative of Billy Budd, its gesture as well to the ideological and armed conflict between England and France. While Melville’s choice of ship names is often read as a critique of the obliteration of human rights by martial law, we might also read the name of the merchant vessel as a reflection on the intercourse between rights discourse and commercialism, an especially prescient indictment in terms of the neoliberal course of mainstreamed gay liberation politics prevailing from the early 1990s to the present.
While the readings of Melville’s allusion to Paine are numerous, I want to draw attention to the relatively neglected scene that opens the text, a peculiar tableau seemingly extraneous to the plot. Although the subtitle to Billy Budd promises an “inside narrative,” the novella’s perspective is hardly transparent, and in fact, the reader is as likely to pass over as to take note of the text’s initial perspective, embedded in the first sentence of Melville’s difficult prose, which is that of the “arrested” attention of a flaneur captivated by a “group of bronzed mariners . . . ashore on liberty.” In fact, it is not the perspective of this apocryphal cruiser to which the reader is privy but rather that of the narrator, disavowed and projected onto the flaneur, strolling (or trolling) the docks. The sentence reads, “In a time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty.” This hypothetical stroller conducts the narrator’s disowned desire, then slips out of the narrative nearly imperceptibly.
This preliminary disavowal signals the text’s own frustrated muteness, performatively embodied by Billy Budd’s stutter. The rhetorical disavowal immediately throws into crisis the subtitle’s promise of insider authority and authenticity. The inside narrative is hardly transparent or unmediated; rather, the text presents what Marty Roth has described as a “radically perplexed act of transmission.”3
As the narrator moves from the perspective of the hypothetical flaneur to the narrator’s own reverie of a “Handsome Sailor” flanked by lesser figures of his own class, we witness another curious deflection; rather than the blond, “welkin-eyed” Billy Budd, renamed “Beauty” or “Baby Budd” by his peers and memorialized in ballad, the narrator introduces the reader to “a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterated blood of Ham—a symmetric figure much above the average height” (43). But this is no common sailor. In his very brief appearance in the tale, he is canonized as the sacred bull of sailors, first with an allusion to the constellation Taurus, within which the handsome sailor occupies the place of its brightest star, Aldebaran, and then through an analogy to the “grand sculptured Bull” to which Assyrian priests and faithful “prostrated themselves” (44).
According to the narrator’s account, he encounters the African sailor in Liverpool, a cosmopolitan site of commerce as well as a crucial port for the slave trade. While the tributes to Billy Budd’s beauty fix on his blond, pale whiteness in a way that registers another instance of the narrative’s stuttered or muted transmissions, the description of the African sailor, the novella’s proto-male “beauty,” is elaborate and works also to establish a kind of cosmopolitan style and an erotic simultaneously manifested and sublimated:
The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest, in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head. It was a hot noon in July; and his face, lustrous with perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor. In jovial sallies right and left, his white teeth flashing into view, he rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates. These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly of Representatives of the Human Race. (43)
Although the appearance of the African sailor in the tale is abbreviated to one short paragraph, I argue that Billy Budd serves as a proxy for the erotized exotic as much as the African sailor serves to mediate the narrative’s muted and perplexed homoerotic desire. The exoticism embodied in the African sailor tempers with and through difference the dangerous sameness of the homosexual desire for which Billy becomes the object. If Billy Budd instances, as Sedgwick argues, the late-nineteenth-century emergence of a modern gay male identity, then it is critical also to interrogate the why and how of that conjunction between gay and modern. The march of the African sailor through Liverpool is fifty years removed from the telling of the story, and the narrator is also careful to locate his imagined flaneur in the “time before steamships.” The narrative’s effusive eroticization of Billy seems to require a further mediation across various nostalgic turns, whether the idealization of a preindustrial era, the fantasy of savage beauty joined to idyllic, dumb happiness in the figure of the African sailor whose face after all beams with “barbaric good humor,” the contradictory fantasy of an unadulterated blackness (an untouched otherness) set in cosmopolitan Liverpool, or the persistent infantilization of Billy and its harkening for a pre-oedipal innocence, hence the epithet “Baby Budd.” What work exactly does the adjective “modern” do in Sedgwick’s formulation, “modern gay male”? What difference does modern make? To point to the obvious, the difference rests in modern’s location of difference in temporality, specifically its nostalgic evocations of the child and the primitive as the pre-lives of gay male subjectivity. The question of the novella’s “inside narrative” is then perhaps not so much a question of privileging the insider’s authority as it is a question of the production of an inside itself and its constituent contradictory elements. The reader’s task is less the determination of veracity (i.e., whose story most approximates actuality: the official military account, the sailors’ lore recorded in the novella’s concluding ballad, or the narrator’s “radically perplexed act of transmission”) than the appreciation of the emergence of a new kind of inside narrative and the determination of what outside violences (i.e., “imperial and neo-imperial contexts”) are necessary for its claim to self-knowledge, a claim simultaneously to subjecthood and to self-transparency. As Neville Hoad explains, gay male identity, in its particularly “modern,” late-nineteenth-century manifestation, requires evolutionary and primitivist logics in order to construct its “narrative of an ultimately unified subject, comprising a branching hierarchy in which the manifold others of this subject are perceived as already incorporated into and transcended by the subject. This incorporation and transcendence is achieved by the temporalisation of space” (133; emphasis his).
While scholarship on Billy Budd has neglected the African sailor introduced in the work’s first page, twentieth-century writers and filmmakers such as Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Claire Denis have elaborated on the novella’s Africanist presence. Genet’s novel Querelle transforms the beautiful blond sailor into a figure closer to Wilde’s Dorian Gray than to his original model, Billy Budd. Like Dorian, Querelle presents the murderous, cynical savage. Melville’s African sailor is invoked in Genet’s novel when Querelle appears to his enthralled admirer, Lieutenant Seblon, blackened by coal dust. Querelle, who has recently in the narrative discovered his pleasure in being “buggered” (by the brothel owner, Nono), uses the coal dust as a seductive veil—suggesting both the Africanist in Billy Budd and the Orientalism of Dorian Gray:
The handsome blond boy, secretly adored, would very soon appear, naked perhaps, but re-invested with great majesty. The coal dust was not thick enough to quite conceal the brightness of the hair, the eyebrows and the skin, nor the rosy coloration of the lips and ears. It was obviously just a veil, and Querelle raised it now and again by occasionally, coquettishly, one might say artfully blowing on his arms or ruffling a curl of his hair. (85)
Querelle uses blackface as a means of playing with the norms of gender and sexuality that otherwise compel his behavior and that of the other male characters (sailors, laborers, policemen, and violent criminals) bound to class-specific standards of virility. His seduction of Seblon invokes both the blond beauty, Baby Budd, and the image of the exotic, ebony sailor. Querelle manipulates his “veil” of coal dust to create a racial masquerade:
Well, certainly nothing but a little coal dust—familiar enough, in name and consistency; that simple ordinary stuff, so capable of making a face, a pair of hands, appear coarse and dirty—yet it invested this young blond sailorboy with all the mysterious powers of a faun, of a heathen idol, of a volcano, of a Melanesian archipelago. He was himself, yet he was so no longer. (87)
Querelle’s and Seblon’s shared fantasies of blackness mediate the sailor’s performance of a queered masculinity. The scene illustrates Hoad’s argument about the modern gay subject’s “incorporation and transcendence” of the other “achieved through the temporalisation of space.” The working-class cosmopolitanism of sailors produces a geographic and cultural knowledge through which that temporalization is elaborated and authorized.
While Melville’s Billy Budd offers a foundational text for modern gay male identity, the endlessly perplexed transmissions of its inside narrative destabilize the construction of that identity as a unified subject, but that destabilization can only be appreciated by attending to the significance of the narrator’s nostalgia for the ebony sailor he encounters on the docks of Liverpool. Genet’s text (like Fassbinder’s and Denis’s afterward) more fully deconstructs that unified subject. Melville’s text, after all, cannot deconstruct what it cannot name. But therein lies its usefulness to Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet. However, I return to this foundational gay text in order to reconsider the now taken-for-granted centrality of the closet as the defining metaphor for modern gay identity.
The privacy of the closet, of the epistemological and ontological spaces demarcated as inside, depends upon the publicity of the brown body—in this case, more specifically, an African body on the...

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