“Little Brown Brother” in Harlem: Effacing Queer Difference and Orientalist Signifiers in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
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Wallace Thurman, whom Langston Hughes hailed as a “strangely brilliant black boy,” was an unconventional but popular writer during the Harlem Renaissance. This essay interrogates the black-Asian conjunction in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929). More specifically, I examine how Thurman’s novel seemingly elides the interaction within the racial margins in the racially diverse metropolis of New York City in the early twentieth century. In The Blacker the Berry, Thurman introduces a multiracial character, Alva, whose “mother had been an American mulatto [and] father a Filipino.” In essence, Alva’s body becomes a site in which multiple race, ethnicity, and sexuality converge. However, other than imprinting “oriental” features on Alva, Thurman does not directly address his Asianness any further; no one in the novel, not even Alva himself, comments on his Asian heritage. It is interesting to see, nonetheless, how Alva complicates notions of black masculinity for Thurman, which is demonstrated by Thurman’s deployment of Alva as straddling masculinity and effeminacy; Emma Lou Morgan, Thurman’s heroine, locates Alva’s masculine appeal in his Asianness, even as his “Orientality” later becomes a marker of his sexual deviance. Moreover, even as Alva is mostly identified as black throughout the novel, his “oriental” features become prominent when he finds himself in compromising situations and thereby prompt his racial castration. Consequently, it becomes imperative to consider what is at stake for Thurman to obscure a specific part of Alva’s racial/ethnic heritage. In sum, this essay investigates Alva’s body as an apposite site wherein we can grapple with the reciprocity and the blurred boundaries between the binaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
Abstract
Wallace Thurman, whom Langston Hughes hailed as a “strangely brilliant black boy,” was an unconventional but popular writer during the Harlem Renaissance. This essay interrogates the black-Asian conjunction in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929). More specifically, I examine how Thurman’s novel seemingly elides the interaction within the racial margins in the racially diverse metropolis of New York City in the early twentieth century. In The Blacker the Berry, Thurman introduces a multiracial character, Alva, whose “mother had been an American mulatto [and] father a Filipino.” In essence, Alva’s body becomes a site in which multiple race, ethnicity, and sexuality converge. However, other than imprinting “oriental” features on Alva, Thurman does not directly address his Asianness any further; no one in the novel, not even Alva himself, comments on his Asian heritage. It is interesting to see, nonetheless, how Alva complicates notions of black masculinity for Thurman, which is demonstrated by Thurman’s deployment of Alva as straddling masculinity and effeminacy; Emma Lou Morgan, Thurman’s heroine, locates Alva’s masculine appeal in his Asianness, even as his “Orientality” later becomes a marker of his sexual deviance. Moreover, even as Alva is mostly identified as black throughout the novel, his “oriental” features become prominent when he finds himself in compromising situations and thereby prompt his racial castration. Consequently, it becomes imperative to consider what is at stake for Thurman to obscure a specific part of Alva’s racial/ethnic heritage. In sum, this essay investigates Alva’s body as an apposite site wherein we can grapple with the reciprocity and the blurred boundaries between the binaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
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