Sweetback Style: Wallace Thurman and a Queer Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

In a letter to William Jourdan Rapp, his collaborator on the plays "Harlem" and "Jeremiah the Magnificent," Wallace Thurman asserted that he wanted to formulate a "new philosophy for a new generation of younger Negroes." 1 To many of his contemporaries, Thurman not only failed to realize such a grandiose ambition, he disseminated instead what they labeled "effeminate Tommyrot" (qtd. in Thurman, "Negro Artists" 37). In such a "homophobic" denunciation of Thurman's oeuvre (one of which, however, Thurman boasted in his own autobiographical sketches), we see not only his offense against middle-class assimilationist proprieties, but equally the perceived threat he posed to a specific historical formulation of urban black masculinity. In her seminal study of the constitution of black women's bodies within Harlem culture, Hazel Carby has argued that key fictional texts such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem depict a "journey of black masculinity in formation," a journey that depended on the protagonists' control and conquest over "threatening embodiments of the female" ("Policing" 749). While Carby's analysis points us toward an association between a new style of urban masculinity and the oppression of black women's bodies and sexuality, I want to look more closely at the ambivalence within this emergent racial masculinity. [End Page 899] In contrast to writers such as Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman developed a new philosophy for the New Negro that linked sexual deviance with the blurring of the "perpetual bugaboo" of identity-based thinking: the sweetback style. 2 While many Harlem Renaissance writers posited a hypermasculine racialized body to counter white supremacist theories of the black man's emasculation, Thurman by contrast offers his readers a queer black male body that is, as Philip Brian Harper contends, "politically volatile" precisely because its desires are unpredictable and in excess of the normative discourses of race and heterosexuality (147).