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

Norman Mailer's 1957 essay "The White Negro" has long been regarded as a paradigmatic example of the white male investment in African American masculinity. Few contemporary discussions of the 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 the white romance with Harlem Renaissance 'primitivism,' to Elvis Presley and the countless interracial male 'buddy' films that Hollywood continues to produce. (2) "The White Negro" 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 the 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 the "psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the 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 "generational rebellion" that appealed to the presumed authenticity of blackness to deliver white hipsters from the bleak conformity of the nuclear age. (4) Mailer's celebration of the downtown hip subculture does recall, for instance, Jack Kerouac's paean to the "life, joy, kicks, darkness ... night" he believed were the province of the "Negro" (181), while Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" suggests as well that the beats looked to black culture to "fix their needs" (Lhamon 72). But it is the 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 the "stench of fear [that] has come out of every pore of American life" and when he declares that the "heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis" (355), he seeks to vanquish something more particular than the generic postwar anomie he invokes. Mailer's effort to appropriate a powerful phallic 'blackness' for the white hipster functions in part to mask the presence of another racial body: the Jewish victim of the 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 the US--such as Mike Gold, Gerald Green, and Irwin Shaw, among many others--to "remasculinize" (5) the 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 the right to Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce on the 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, "The White Negro" 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 the 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 the 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 the singular creator of a refurbished Jewish masculinity in the postwar era. …