"The (Jewish) White Negro": Norman Mailer's Racial Bodies

Abstract

Norman Mailer's 1957 essay White has long been regarded as a paradigmatic example of white male investment in African American masculinity. Few contemporary discussions of meanings that white men make of 'blackness' fail to invoke Mailer's essay; (1) indeed, his work often serves to name a whole US tradition of interracial desire and fantasy, from nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy and white romance with Harlem Renaissance 'primitivism,' to Elvis Presley and countless interracial male 'buddy' films that Hollywood continues to produce. (2) White is certainly a part of this genealogy, as Eric Lott reminds us when he calls Mailer's essay the twentieth century reinvention of [the] ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations that animated minstrel performance (Love and Theft 54). But critical attention to continuity of this tradition has been perhaps too insistent, working to obscure a central historical referent of Mailer's famous piece. The white preoccupation with black masculinity takes on new resonances, I will suggest, when a Jewish writer begins his 1957 essay with an allusion to psychic havoc of concentration camps and atom bomb (338). When critics do locate Mailer's essay within its historical moment, (3) they tend to align it with other 1950s expressions of rebellion that appealed to presumed authenticity of blackness to deliver white hipsters from bleak conformity of nuclear age. (4) Mailer's celebration of downtown hip subculture does recall, for instance, Jack Kerouac's paean to life, joy, kicks, darkness ... night he believed were province of Negro (181), while Allen Ginsberg's Howl suggests as well that beats looked to black culture to fix their needs (Lhamon 72). But it is specificity of Mailer's racial fixation that I want to examine here, precisely because it has so often been called upon to describe a collective or a generational desire. When Mailer recoils from stench of fear [that] has come out of every pore of American life and when he declares that heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at moment of crisis (355), he seeks to vanquish something more particular than generic postwar anomie he invokes. Mailer's effort to appropriate a powerful phallic 'blackness' for white hipster functions in part to mask presence of another racial body: Jewish victim of Nazi Holocaust. Mailer's project here is of course by no means an unprecedented one. As Paul Breines and others have amply documented, there is a long history of efforts by Jewish male writers in US--such as Mike Gold, Gerald Green, and Irwin Shaw, among many others--to remasculinize (5) Jewish body, both before and after World War II, according to dominant notions of physical courage and heterosexual virility. (6) And as 1 suggest below, critics have paid ample attention to those Jewish male writers, ranging from Norman Podhoretz on right to Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce on left, who have worked prolifically both to worry about and to celebrate their own presumed linkages to African American masculinity. Mailer's essay occupies a peculiar place in this history, however. Ritually invoked in academic discussions of Jewish masculinity, White is at once read as a Jewish literary production by a Jewish male writer and, as Jeffrey Melnick suggests, simultaneously repositioned as a symptomatic expression of white male desire and anxiety. While Melnick aptly reminds us that the history of white Negroism in American twentieth century is a cultural field defined primarily by middle-class Jews engaged in significant acts of individual and group identity formation (120), I argue here that essay's own systematic occlusions have functioned successfully to re-write white Negroism as exactly that--white Negroism. My focus on Mailer here, then, does not reflect an effort to position him as singular creator of a refurbished Jewish masculinity in postwar era. …