"Ironic soil" (1): recuperative rhythms and negotiated nationalisms.

The fact of the matter is that major nationalist theoreticians have generally been exceedingly humanistic.... In fact, a strong tendency to reach beyond themselves toward union with mankind has been a marked characteristic of most nationalist theoreticians from David Walker to Paul Robeson. The nationalists' concern for their fellow man should be kept in mind in order to avoid doing violence to the meaning of historic black nationalism. (Stuckey 28)

I worry at this particular moment in our history where a lot of the gains that were brought about, to a certain extent, by some of the more positive attributes of nationalism are really being threatened. As much as I would like to eliminate the radically exclusionary attitudes of certain forms of black nationalism, I don't want to get rid of Affirmative Action and I really feel strongly about making these distinctions. (Coco Fusco in Black Nations/Queer Nations?) (2)

**********

Throughout his essay "It's Raining Men: Notes on the Million Man March," Robert Reid-Pharr eloquently describes the difficulty that black nationalist discourses have in relation to homosexuality (164-75). At the root of black nationalist discourses is an assumption that blackness and homosexuality are mutually exclusive, that queer-identified people are "selfish, unnatural [and] anathema to the building of a strong black nation" (Williams 136). This notion that blackness and heterosexuality are natural pairs and that "authentic" blackness cannot contain or does not include queer identifications as well, is one that has been aptly deconstructed by critics such as Philip Brian Harper, Audre Lorde, Wahneema Lubiano, Dwight McBride, Kendall Thomas, Rhonda M. Williams, and others. (3) Reid-Pharr identifies the blatant homophobia embodied specifically in the rhetoric of the Million Man March by noting that "if the real message of the march was that it is going to take a heroic black masculinity to restore order to our various communities, especially poor and working-class communities, then it follows that black gay men are irrelevant, or even dangerous, to that project" (166). Moreover, Reid-Pharr cogently discusses the politics of "the nation" (and here, the black nation largely writ could be said to have been collapsed under the sign of the "Nation" of Islam since Farrakhan was the instigator of the March) as embodied by the March as black as heterosexual, and as exclusive of women. Like the aforementioned critics of a black nationalism that is invested in a disciplining and policing of sexuality and gender, Reid-Pharr reads the politics of the march as bound to the same homophobic and sexist logic that has often been an undeniable aspect of black nationalism. He argues, "For, if the definition of blackness hinges on heterosexuality, then either blackness and homosexuality are [sic] incommensurable (and black gays are not really black) or the notion of blackness is untenable, as witnessed by the large numbers of black gay men" (167).

As Reid-Pharr continues, contemporary queer thought renders void the idea that black and queer are mutually exclusive terms. Contemporary queer theorists do well to study race and sexuality. What I seek to examine here is the way in which a critique of black nationalism does not necessarily move one past the nationalist moment. I am calling for a queering of black nationalism that stretches and bends the limits of nationalism so that it can include those identities and subjects it theoretically views as outlaw. I begin with an invocation of Reid-Pharr's essay because, while he ably unpacks the problematic aspects of the rhetoric of the Million Man March, he ends by observing, "Here, then, despite the regressive racial and gender politics that framed the Million Man March, there were countless improvisational moments of transcendence" (175). Reid-Pharr's consideration of the Million Man March is not an under-valuation and dismissal of the event based on its predictably anachronistic political implications. Rather, Reid-Pharr's essay participates in an emerging trend at "queer" sites that not only calls into question black nationalism's heterosexism, but also, and perhaps most importantly, seeks to invade it, to subvert and deconstruct the logic of nationalism by occupying its space. These renegotiations of nationalism traverse the boundary of the "almost not quite" that opens a previously closed space for once excluded identities. The focus of my essay here is the emergence of such "improvisational moments of transcendence" in queer discourses that remake, renegotiate, and revamp nationalism (175).

As my epigraphs from Coco Fusco and Sterling Stuckey suggest, many critics are loathe to dismiss black nationalism. Their disinterestedness in dismissing black nationalism is due, in large part, to the persistence of racism: a nation horribly scarred by tragedies of race unsurprisingly embodies some members who find relevant a discourse that figures itself as overturning and opposing racism. Persistent American racism means that in US queer discourses, "race emerges unscathed. Indeed, blackness has been bolstered, insofar as we were all forced [at the Million Man March and, as I argue here, at other "black" sites], at least those of us who are black and otherwise, to scurry for cover under the great black mantle, to fly our colors" (Reid-Pharr 167). The appeal of Black nationalism, which cannot be severed from its problematic, then, is rooted in a complicated set of needs and aversions.

Let me focus briefly on the allure of black nationalism, decades after its late-1960's and 70's heyday. In his seminal essay for The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, Stuckey defines black nationalism as:

   A consciousness of a shared experience
   of oppression at the hands of white
   people, an awareness and approval of
   the persistence of group traits and
   preferences in spite of a violently anti-African
   larger society, a recognition of
   bonds and obligations between
   Africans everywhere, an irreducible
   conviction that Africans in America
   must take responsibility for liberating
   themselves--these were among the
   pivotal components of the world view
   of the black men who finally framed
   the ideology. (6)

This "consciousness of a shared experience of oppression" is the pivotal component that continues to exist today. The shared experience of oppression is an "everyday" reality in the lives of most people who either are defined as "black" by American society or identify themselves as black based on their ancestry, cultural values, or sociopolitical experiences. Stuckey's claim speaks to what Wahneema Lubiano has called "everyday ideology." That black people must "liberate themselves," as Stuckey says, is the cornerstone of this everyday ideology, which Lubiano defines as "the cultural logic of black peoples' historical self-consciousness" ("Black Nationalism" 236). Such cultural logic is what dictates the feeling of anger at the phenomenon of black America's "black on black crime." Essex Hemphill exemplifies this sentiment in a poem: "Black men killing black men is treason. Black men killing black women is treason" (Black Nations/Queer Nations ?). (4) Hemphill's reliance on a black nationalist logic is indicated by his use of the word "treason," which indicates a betrayal of the state. The same logic encourages US consumers to "buy black," to support African American economic growth and development. (5) All of these issues and concerns are part of what Coco Fusco might call the more "positive attributes of nationalism."

As Fusco hints, however, there are also negative attributes of nationalist loyalties. Stuckey's definition of black nationalism, for example, excludes women, perhaps in a mimesis of Eurocentric nationalist notions of "forefathers" as the founders of a liberating ideology. There is also the uninterrogated term "blackness," which does not account for "the shifting multiplicities of a group that understands itself as 'black' " (Lubiano, The House 233). Furthermore, as others have argued, (black) nationalism is also deeply interested in the literal, or corporeal, reproduction of the nation through heterosexuality. What I seek to explore in this essay is a text that manages a negotiation of black nationalism that at once internalizes some problematic nationalist notions while at the same time subverts nationalist logic to allow for gay and lesbian identity. I want to focus on one site in black queer production that "represent[s] black gays and lesbians as integral, if beleaguered, members of the black family" (Reid-Pharr 167), and to focus on ways that membership into the "family" of blackness is achieved at these sites. I want not only to demonstrate the difficulties such nationalist paradigms pose, but also to consider why theorists continue to entertain them, what they accomplish, for what means and toward what end. While ultimately I would argue that there is no way to "fix" nationalism so that it will work, I want to consider texts that negotiate nationalism with efficacy. As Lubiano points out, "Black nationalism is plural, flexible and contested"; thus, it expands to legitimate certain forms of desire and it contracts to exclude others ("Black Nationalism" 232).

One reason to discuss texts that recuperate nationalism in some way is to give serious attention to an ideology that has so captivated a people and mobilized a movement. Despite intense skepticism and scrutiny with respect to black nationalism, it remains "extremely complicated, often reactionary, and dangerously effective in the way that it can and has organized specific groups of black people, under specific circumstances" (Lubiano, "Black Nationalism" 232). In other words, despite its shortcomings--and because of them--it deserves our attention. This merit seems especially significant at a moment when the landscape of political mobilization has shifted so radically and so quickly in the twenty-first century that the articulation of a "black" response to national crises has become increasingly difficult to name, much less to negotiate; the Million Man March is just one example of the way shifting and multiple constituencies within the black community complicate "our" "nation." Again, my epigraph from Fusco that illustrates the question of nationalism as activism is one that remains relevant in and to the black community. Thus, I want to explore one such site of negotiated nationalism, an early 1990's re-consideration of nationalism by a subject that nationalism, as it has been traditionally and conventionally conceptualized, would exclude.

The musical album Plantation Lullabies (1993), by Me'Shell NdegeOcello, is a good example of the kind of recuperative rhythms and negotiated nationalism that form my major interests. Plantation Lullabies is significant not only because of its musical content (the soundtrack) but also because of the photographs and artwork in the CD booklet (its visual track). Song titles like "Soul on Ice" and "Dread Loc" articulate a form of nationalism that blends black militancy with Afrocentricity. This strain of nationalism is bracketed by the emergence of Kwanzaa and an ideological reliance on Egyptian and Yoruba religious traditions. For many of the proponents of this form of nationalism, such as Amen-Ra and Maulana Karenga, the goal has been to have black Americans return to an African tradition as "the first functional step toward a greater African American future" (Van Deburg 275). For the moment I will define Afrocentricity as an approach that, as stated by Molefi Kete Asante, "seeks in every situation the appropriate centrality of the African person. In education this means that the teacher provides students the opportunity to study the world and its people, concepts, and history from an African world view" (Van Deburg 290). NdegeOcello's Plantation Lullabies voices anger at being deprived of this history: "We've been indoctrinated and convinced by the white racist standard of beauty," she tells us in her lyrics to "Soul on Ice," a title identical to Eldridge Cleaver's for his 1967 book of autobiographical essays.

Cleaver's title graphically suggests his subsequent discussion of black male sexual desire for white women. In her song of the same name, NdegeOcello observes,

   Your soul's on ice Brother brother Are
   you suffering from a social infection
   mis-direction Excuse me does the
   white woman go better with your
   Brooks Brothers suit? (6)

And filling in an absence in Cleaver's version, NdegeOcello includes the history of slaveholding white men's sexual exploitation of enslaved black women: "but my my, Master's in the slave house again." Her confrontation with racism is staged through anti-miscegenation discourse, and it organizes her political agenda as specifically related to race.

These exclamations, however, did not wax revolutionary in 1993, the year of the album's initial release. They are little more than a rehearsal of black nationalist dogma, as evidenced by the very text that NdegeOcello references (and arguably revises), Cleaver's Soul On Ice. One reviewer wrote: " 'Soul On Ice' is probably her most controversial track. It's been a part of a very long-running thread in [African American culture]. Despite reports of her apparent okay-ness with interracial/cultural relationships, she seems to see no contradiction with also being annoyed with those who buy into 'the White racist standard of beauty.'" (7) This incongruity between ideology that NdegeOcello advocates as a person and that she performs as an artist indicates that we must view her album as a politics of performativity.

Along with her nationalist critique of a putatively historical miscegenation, NdegeOcello also performs heterosexuality most explicitly on the tracks "Dread Loc" (as in the line that states, "ooh! how I love a black man") and "Call Me," which includes the line, "You can be king for a day I'll be the queen." The last example invokes an Afrocentric royal African lineage and past in order to salvage a self-esteem beaten down by oppression. (8) In these heterosexual love songs, NdegeOcello champions heteronormative black masculinity and nuclear family; in fact, the entire album fully engages with black nationalist discourse.

Just as her material versus performative contradictions mark "Soul on Ice," the heterosexual love songs on the album are complicated by NdegeOcello's self-proclaimed bisexuality, which certainly violates the thorough and relentless heterosexism of black nationalist sexual politics. (9) Despite its rehearsals of black nationalist race and sex ideologies, NdegeOcello's album manages to undercut these political mores through its visual economy and through the discursive position that NdegeOcello takes as the first person singer in some of the other love songs, specifically in "Outside your Door" and "Picture Show." In both of these songs, NdegeOcello does not allude to black men but is tellingly silent as to the gender of the person she is wooing. This omission indicates that NdegeOcello's sexual identity functions as an open space in the sexual discourse that frames the album. Given the insistence on gendered identification in the aforementioned songs, the silence in this regard on these others songs enables a queer reading.

Adrienne Rich noted in 1975 that "women's love for women has been represented almost entirely through silence and lies.... Hetero-sexuality as an institution has also drowned in silence the erotic feelings between women" (qtd. in Collecott 92). However, NdegeOcello's desire for women is signaled (or represented, to use Rich's exact terminology) through silence and the "lies" of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, which counterbalance the ambiguous gender of the object of the speaker's desire on the other tracks. In other words, Plantation Lullabies suggests that in order to be "down," or politically acceptable (read homogenous), the figure of the speaker must submerge her (queer) sexual politics to her (black nationalist) racial politics, a much discussed problem in black nationalist discourses. (10) In those discourses, conventionally masculine accounts of oppression take precedence over "feminine" ones, and black male heterosexual virility is a striking characteristic of the nationalist persona. (11) This tendency to elevate black nationalism (read here as specifically masculine and masculinist desires and concerns) to the exclusion of feminine discourses and/or of lesbian discourses is a striking feature of this album.

NdegeOcello's emphasis on nationalism also signals a discomfort with articulating lesbian desire by masking it in ambiguity. In her interesting and useful essay, "What is not said: a study in textual inversion," Diana Collecott discusses "lesbian silence" in literary texts, pointing out that the uninterrogated reading of "gayness" as male "leaves the lesbian conscious of herself as an absence from discourse, and the lesbian writer, teacher or theorist in an historical position that does not synchronize with the relative recognition and the relative freedom of gay men to write, teach and theorize" (Collecott 92). NdegeOcello's "absence from discourse" seems the result of routine exclusion of lesbians when black male nationalist politics is privileged. And though her queer politics and eroticism seem to be submerged beneath the album's explicitly nationalist agenda, other aspects of the album as a material object suggest a counterdiscursive thread that revises what on the surface appears to be an uncritical black nationalist approach. In "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Barbara Smith argues that "if in a woman writer's work a sentence refused to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature" (2308). This contention also applies to NdegeOcello's work, which, while not "literature," functions as a woman's cultural text that does not do "what it is supposed to do" and refuses linearity and presents a majestic image of women.

It is possible, then, to read the persistence of a problematic nationalism in Plantation Lullabies not as its devotion to nationalist discourses, but instead as a highlighting of its anxiety about race, gender, and sexuality. Furthermore, that persistently problematic nationalism insinuates NdegeOcello's anxiety about how to articulate a "revolutionary" racial and sexual politics. This complicated play on nationalism is clear in the images that function as a counter-narrative to the ostensible heterosexism of some of the album's tracks. An androgynous, caricatured black face with white circles for eyes and lips invokes minstrelsy. That this "blackface" appears on a yellow background with a red circle with a line through it, and appears alongside the album's barcode, which is reproduced eight times in the top left hand corner (Fig. 1) suggests NdegeOcello's break with negative stereotypes of black performance. The complex visual details tell us that on this album we will not find "typical" depictions of blackness, and warn us that such caricatures are forbidden. The red prohibitive circle functions as both universal symbol and command; it definitively enacts the album's political boundaries. The repetitive reproduction of the barcode suggests the mechanism of capitalism at play in the performance of stereotypes of blackness as entertainment. It is an image that "jives" with, corresponds to, the nationalist politics of the lyrics in songs like "Soul on Ice," but ultimately this image seems cast as less important than other images, specifically those that speak to each other not only about race, but also about gender and sexuality.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The nationalism (and hence the spoken heterosexuality and unarticulated lesbianism/queer sexuality) of the album, however, is compromised by its visual subtext. In the clearest black and white photograph of her in the CD booklet, NdegeOcello wears a man's suit, gendered by its pair of broad suspenders. Beneath this picture (Fig. 2) a verbal text in miniscule print explains that NdegeOcello is a Swahili word meaning "free like a bird." In this picture, NdegeOcello performs a butch aesthetic, and paired with the definition of her name, suggests that she is "free" to love whomever she chooses and to look however she chooses. This declaration of independence is particularly significant in the context of her claim that her music can be classed as hip hop: one reviewer has contested this avowal by saying, "So, anyway, I don't do non-Hip Hop reviews, [but] look man, she claims she's Hip Hop." (12) Thus, rather than substantiating Plantation Lullabies as bona fide hip hop, this reviewer of hip hop production delegitimates the album's self-acknowledged hip hop nomenclature and puts the burden of "proof" that NdegdOcello indeed produces hip hop on her. Moreover, the reviewer participates in the heavy policing of hip hop as a category justifiably exclusionary because exclusively masculine.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

A second black and white frontal photograph of the artist in the same suit (Fig. 3), with the top half of her face cut off, has Greg Tate's famous prose-poem about "alternative hiphop" superimposed on top of the subject's chest and hips. While the first photograph (Fig. 2) shows a slightly disheveled and playful looking NdegdOcello, this second, unsmiling figure (Fig. 3) appears suited, fully buttoned and arranged, de-sexualized and gender ambiguous: the subject could be either male or female given the visual information we are (not) provided about the body in this photograph. Tate writes that "There's no such thing as alternative hiphop"--an idea that Plantation Lullabies undercuts with its differences from many of the more conventional productions by male hip hop artists.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

At stake in NdegeOcello's claim to hip hop is the fact that she is a (queer) woman in an artistic field gendered (straight) male and, moreover, a field representative of black male disaffection and rage. (13) NdegeOcello uses to her advantage the definition of hip hop in Tate's prose-poem as "James Brown's pelvis digitally grinded into technomorphine" (Fig. 3, line 24) as well as Tate's apparent admiration for

   The grim little sister in the black raincoat
   [who] stepped up to the mic and
   said,
      "... THERE'S NO SUCH THING
      AS ALTERNATIVE HIPHOP!"
      (Fig. 3, lines 4-6)

From his own characterization of NdegeOcello, then, Tate's deduces that "the only known alternative to hip hop / is dead silence" (Fig. 3, lines 2-3). By replicating Tate's revolutionary attitude towards hip hop in the visual-verbal liner notes of her album, NdegeOcello lends a radical and feminized importance to Tate's words. The contention in Tate's prose-poem that "Hiphop is the inverse of capitalism / Hiphop is the reverse of colonialism" (lines 8-9) begs the question of how hip hop--or better, whether hip hop can reverse or inverse sexual and gender identity? Tate's hip hop discourse, superimposed on a photograph of NdegeOcello dressed in a suit, marks her trespass of conventional forms of male expression, power, and privilege. As much as her soundtrack articulates a black nationalist and therefore essentially male discourse, the visual images in the CD booklet undermine the heterosexism of the very nationalist discourse that some of her songs seem to endorse.

However, NdegeOcello encodes some ambiguity into Tate's proclamation that there is no alternative hip hop. While the reading performed above invites one way to understand Tate's statement, the prose-poem could also be read as a way of including all forms of hip hop and normalizing them, rather than read as excluding non-masculinist forms of hip hop. By superimposing Tate's words over an image of her body, NdegeOcello could be suggesting that hers is not an alternative hip hop, but that hers is, she is hip hop--that indeed, "There's no such thing as alternative hiphop" (Fig. 3, line 1); hip hop is simply and unequivocally hip hop. In this way, NdegeOcello could be answering such critics as Charles Isbell, who argues that she isn't hip hop by using one of hip hop's most famous and respected scribes to authenticate her project as hip hop, or in other words, as legitimately and authentically "black." The ambiguous play on the line "There's no such thing as alternative hiphop" mimics the album's renegotiation of race politics and outlaw homosexuality.

Significantly, the booklet also reproduces Tate's cited line about hip hop's singularity onto two separate images. The words "alternative hiphop" are writ large in red lowercase letters and superimposed across an image of NdegeOcello's torso, naked except for a wreath of cotton blossoms (Fig. 4). This image connotes the institution of slavery: its auction blocks, upon which black people were paraded nearly or completely denuded; its forced labors, including the picking of cotton and other crops; and most relevantly, its sexual exploitation of women. NdegeOcello's exposed breasts, more generally, invoke the iconography of the degraded black female body. (14) Her hands and face are illuminated such that they appear white; they are upturned, supplicant. The subject's head is slightly tilted; her parted lips, together with the stretch of fingers on her right hand, suggest suffering and pain. Except for the white cotton balls, the image is lit and shadowed in brilliant teal blue tones.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

This image of black female bodily exposure and suffering, bearing a symbolic albatross of black oppression (cotton), produces dynamic tension with the ease (playful) and confident (serious) black and white pictures of NdegeOcello in conventional men's attire. Femininity, through the symbolic signification of these images, is distressed and yearning while masculinity is powerful and contained. Despite NdegeOcello's replication of Tate's statement, Fig. 4 contradicts Tate's argument against an alternative hip hop by suggesting that black women's hip hop production does perform an alternative to (hyper-) masculine hip hop discourses. The superimposition of the red words "alternative hiphop" on this image invites spectators to connect this suffering black (and blue) and female body--the articulation of its truths--to an alternative to traditional hip hop. Through the images in her liner notes, NdegeOcello challenges Tate's claims about hip hop, particularly his construction of it as gendered male ("Hiphop is James Brown's pelvis," line 24), and she critiques, furthermore, the way that conventional hip hop ignores (or worse, creates) black women's bodily suffering. By exposing her breast in this image, NdegeOcello reminds us at once of race and rape, of female gender and aberrant sexuality. The nude image in Fig. 4 both undermines the musical soundtrack and deconstructs the suited photographic subject; it both endorses women's donning male attire and at the same time subverts notions of fixed gender performance and identification.

The full text of the third line of Tate's prose-poem completes the poem's first sentence: "is dead silence." These words are depicted in yet another visual image that makes up the liner notes; they form verbal text distorted by a background (or foreground?) of black and white dots (Fig. 5). In this way, the claim in line one that "there's no such thing as alternative hip hop" is undermined by the fact that there is no visual representation of the disavowal of "alternative hiphop." The placement of this figure and the distorted visual complexity of its graphics together demonstrate that the overall album ultimately debunks Tate's masculinist and exclusionary definition of hip hop. When this figure is encountered and read in standard order, that is, from the front of the CD booklet to the back (as opposed to from the end "backward" to the beginning), then Tate's statement becomes a question: "Is dead silence alternative hip hop?" Similarly, if one reverses the order of lines one through three, then they ask: "is dead silence / the only known alternative to hiphop / [because] there's no such thing as alternative hiphop[?]" This revisionary ordering, and the images that accompany the question, suggests that to answer "yes" is to silence black women who do indeed participate in and perform an "alternative hip hop," especially the alternative lesbian/queer hip hop that is the unspoken and submerged suggestion of the previously discussed songs and of the images of NdegeOcello in men's attire.(15)

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Despite the subversive nature of the images in the CD booklet and the questions about gender, sexuality, and hip hop that they implicitly raise, NdegeOcello's songs articulate a black nationalist politics of heterosexual "black love" and a well-rehearsed nationalist critique of interracial relationships. The incongruity of the verbal soundtrack with the visual liner images suggests an ambivalent desire for acceptance by the predominantly black and male hip hop community, and so articulates a race politics that demonstrates that, despite her bisexuality, NdegeOcello is "down for the black man." The images are at odds with the desire for "authentic" blackness in a nationalist context synonymous with heterosexuality. Plantation Lullabies effectively illustrates the way that a text can at once engage nationalism while undermining it. It demonstrates that authors interested in resisting narratives of racism, sexism, and compulsory heterosexuality can at once reject nationalism and endorse it, ably illustrating that while black nationalism "resists both the state and its social and racialized domination," it also "reinscribes the state in particular places within its own narratives of resistance" (Lubiano, "Black Nationalism" 236). This contradiction and complication, in the context of NdegeOcello's album, is metaphorized in its title, which invokes the nightmare of the slave plantation while signifying through the word lullaby, images of horror and comfort, forced labor and soothing sleep, pain and relief from pain. It is precisely this double invocation, this political articulation that is at once mimesis and departure that complicates allegiance, politics, and the articulation of a radical hermeneutics performed by the renegotiated nationalism evident in NdegeOcello's Plantation Lullabies. These questions and contradictions of nationalism, so central to the ongoing discussion of the articulation of black identity, continue to require examination.

Samuel Delany complicates the term "nation," and ostensibly nationalism, by noting that:

   Nation is a metaphor. If we talk about
   black communities, we're suddenly
   speaking about something more vulnerable
   than we would if we were
   speaking about nation ... a nation is
   something that can raise an army ... a
   community is something that is legally
   refused the raising of an army. So I
   think that when we use the metaphor
   of nation in a national situation, it
   functions as a metaphor to suppress or
   turn the focus away from our vulnerability.
   (Black Nations/Queer Nations ?)

Delany's comment illustrates that the term "nation" functions as a shield to deflect attention away from an oppressed community. Assumptions of dominant terminology by oppressed communities, he seems to suggest, is a tool or a weapon against the forces that suppress and threaten these marginalized communities. The use of the term "nation," then, is a tactic more than a description; it is a defensive gesture in the face of an offending system, in the face of a literal and armed nationalism. Just as nationalism cannot be completely dismissed--not only because of continuing oppression but also because of what it has accomplished (as Fusco so astutely points out)--it is bound to be important for defining whatever "new" concept we use to define our struggle for liberation. The most, it seems from the texts I have examined here, that can be imagined at this moment is another kind of country or nation; this is at once specific and ambiguous. "Another" is mutable, and suggests myriad possibilities for change and space for the articulation of panoptical identities, while country implies borders, inherently necessitating an inside and its negative opposite, an outside. Plantation Lullabies suggests that the future holds some of both.

Works Cited

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Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power. A Black Women's Story. New York: Anchor P, 1994. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul On Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Collecott, Diana. "What Is Not Said: A Study in Textual Inversion." Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Gay and Lesbian Writing. Ed. Joseph Bristow. New York: Routledge, 1992. 91-111.

Dunning, Stefanie K. "Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin's Another Country." MELUS 26:2 (2001): 95-115.

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Harper, Philip Brian. "Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Impulse in Responses to the Death of Max Robinson." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 159-75.

Isbell, Jr., Charles. "Me'Shell NdegeOcello's Hip Hop." Dec. 2000 <http://www.seditionists.org/Hfh/reviews/059.nj47.html>

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--. "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others." Lubiano 232-53.

McBride; Dwight A. "Can the Queen Speak?: Racial Essentialism, Sexuality, and the Problem of Authority." The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities. Ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms. New York: Alyson Books, 2001.

NdegeOcello, Me'Shell. Plantation Lullabies. Los Angeles: Maverick, 1993. Nestle, Joan. The Persistent Desire: A Butch/Femme Reader. Boston: Alyson P, 1992. Reid-Pharr, Robert. Black Gay Man: Essays. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Smith, Barbara. "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism." 1977. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 2302-15.

Sounds of Blackness. The Drum: Africa to America. Los Angeles: Perspective, 1994.

Stuckey, Sterling, ed. The Ideological Foundations of Black Nationalism. Boston: Beacon P, 1972.

Thomas, Kendall. "'Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing: Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity." Lubiano 116-35.

Van Deburg, William L. Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan. New York: New York UP, 1997.

Williams, Rhonda M. "Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality and Gender." Lubiano 136-56.

Notes

(1.) This title is a reference to Stuckey's statement that the birth of black nationalism is due in large part to the contradiction between the freedoms promised in the Declaration of Independence and the reality of inequality in early America: "And it was precisely in such ironic soil that an ideology of black nationalism would eventually take root." (3) I invoke this notion of "ironic soil" here to speak to complicated ways in which nationalism is negotiated in the texts I discuss in this chapter.

(2.) Since no text of the film Black Nations/Queer Nations? is available, I have informally transcribed the discourse of the film based on my aural impressions.

(3.) See the essays by McBride, Harper; Lubiano, Thomas, and Williams, as well as Lorde's collection of essays.

(4.) Because I have taken the liberty of informally transcribing the recitation of Hemphill's poem from the film Black Nations/Queer Nations?, I cannot provide line numbers.

(5.) The African American Yellow Pages is a good example of the way in which black nationalism has become "common sense" since the premise of its existence is that black people will want to buy black products in order to support the monolithic US black community.

(6.) The lyrics of Plantation Lullabies are typeset in a continuous pattern such that I cannot provide line numbers.

(7.) See Dunning.

(8.) See, e.g., the album by Sounds of Blackness, titled The Drum: Africa to America, the lyrics to which include: "Kings and Queens, beat down in the new Babylon called America." In response to such fantasies of a royal past, Hemphill reminds us, in an untitled poem, that "someone had to clean the bathrooms" (Black Nations/Queer Nations?).

(9.) NdegeOcello has publicly identified her sexual orientation as "out" bisexual. See Etter.

(10.) Black nationalist discourse has frequently been critiqued--both from inside and outside the movement--for its sexist politics. See Brown.

(11.) The use of guns as a metaphor for freedom, for example, is one way that black nationalism asserts masculinity. This trope might not necessarily have been deployed if leaders like then Stokely Carmichael had not relegated women to a "prone position" within the movement nor to doing such clerical tasks as filing and typing. See Van Deburg on women's actual duties in such black nationalist organizations as the Black Panthers and SNCC.

(12.) See Isbell.

(13.) Cf. Rose.

(14.) Cf. Gilman.

(15.) For more information on the butch aesthetic, see Nestle.

Stefanie K. Dunning is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. She has also published in MELUS and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and is currently at work on a longer exploration of some of the issues introduced here.