Queer identity and racial alienation: The politics of race and sexuality in James Baldwin and in the “New” South Africa

Summary This essay (re‐)examines the critical reception of African‐American writer James Baldwin in the early 1960s, a reception that is itself marked as an interpretive act. The rhetorical and cultural tropes used to read and interpret queer identity and the relation of these tropes to early‐1960s cultural conversations and institutional discourses on pre‐Stonewall queer culture and pre‐DSM‐III medical and psychoanalytic discourses on homosexuality operative at the time in the United States are analyzed, as are the tropes used to read African‐American identity as they informed American civil rights discourses and the concomitant discourses of black struggle and resistance. While references are made to such texts by Baldwin as Another Country (1962), Giovanni's Room (1956), and The Fire Next Time (1963), the primary focus is not on Baldwin's homosexuality per se, or on gay or racial themes in his texts. Rather, the emphasis is on reading the cultural lenses and rhetorical practices that informed interpretations of African‐American and queer identity in Baldwin and in his work in the early 1960s, and the ways in which a variety of oppressions, while not reducible to one another, may intertwine. The essay also examines Baldwin's reception among African‐American critics and intellectuals in the United States Black Power movement in the 1960s, particularly Eldridge Cleaver, who made rhetorical use of the same cultural tropes of pathology and abject gender in reading homosexuality, arguing that homosexuality alienated Baldwin from his African heritage. Through comparative analysis and through examining race through nationalist constructions of sexuality and gender, the essay analyzes how similar cultural tropes used to read homosexuality operate in homophobic discourses in southern Africa, which are more readily mobilized with reference to emerging lesbian and gay movements among Africans, and ignore the politics of sexuality as a site of decolonization.