Race, writing and manhood: Ambivalent identifications and American literary identity in Frank Chin and Ralph Ellison

This dissertation examines two male writers of color who rework a dominant topos of much American literature: the interracial male bond. Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin view themselves as heirs to a literary tradition in which figures like Huck and Jim loom large. In returning to the issues of racial, masculine and sexual identity that such canonized images of male intimacy raise, however, Ellison and Chin present a view from the other side of the racial divide--from the other end of the mythical raft, as it were. This study explores the ambivalence that structures their depictions of interracial homosociality. In their works, Ellison and Chin communicate a yearning for full and equal inclusion in an American homosocial order that persistently subordinates men of color by forcing them to identify with the feminine; they also express the fervent anger that this feminizing subordination produces. One of my central concerns is to show how and why this anger becomes channeled by these writers into literary representations of white male racism that are homophobic and misogynistic. This study also considers how Ellison and Chin imagine writing to be a way of resisting their racial marginalization. Though the works of each writer I examine come in a range of forms--novels, essays, interviews, memoirs, and short stories--I argue that they constitute, in the aggregate, a kind of literary autobiography. In these texts, each claims his place as an American writer, asserting that any adequate American literature must confront the problematic role of race in our culture. But each also seeks to establish himself as a paradigmatic figure in a distinctly African American or Asian American literary tradition, by defining his work as exemplary of an ethnically particular form of aesthetic expression. My analyses of these texts bring particular focus to how the model of authorial identity each writer champions is also explicitly presented as a template of Asian or African American manhood.