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There is perhaps no greater refutation to the bifurcating logic that opposes racial and queer identification than Harlem's black dandy of the 1920s and 30s. A figure of urbanity, decadence, and polished elegance, the black aesthete makes dandyism a badge of openly queer desire and anti-bourgeois politics. When acknowledged in cultural criticism, however, the figure of the black dandy is often deracialized, following the masculinist logic that sees the bisexual or gay African American as a threat to racial unity and the notion of "authentic"-that is, masculine-blackness it is implicitly founded upon. Even when such ideologies are critiqued, as in Michael L. Cobb's essay "Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative," there seems to be no way to get around the reading of queer identity as a "racial death-sentence" (332). Nevertheless, it should be noted that (as the work of Cobb and others indicate) the ambivalent and/or hostile reaction to the black dandy has its roots in the contradictions of the Renaissance itself, as well as in the increasing association of dandyism with homosexual "vice" in the early part of the twentieth century.1 As a wide range of critics and historians have demonstrated, the established black bourgeoisie and representatives of the Talented Tenth such as Du Bois came to see the dandy-and his queerness in particular-as the embodiment of a form of decadence that they believed threatened to overtake the Renaissance and tarnish the "New Negro," thus making the dandified aesthete a widely recognized symbol of the social disintegration and corruption associated with modernization and urban life.2
This essay argues that the complexities and contradictions of dandyism as symbol and oppositional act make legible not simply the bifurcation of race and sexuality but rather their interrelation. Furthermore, this epistemic relation between racial and sexual categories emerges out of the dialectic between primitivism and decadence that defines the construction of modern African-American identity and cultural modernity itself. When contemporary literary and cultural critics represent the black dandy only or primarily as the condensation of African-American anxieties about racial uplift-anxieties that equate racial and sexual respectability-they actually reinforce an ideological fiction about the "threat" of queerness to black identity and leave unaddressed the important critical task of theorizing race and sexuality together. By examining Wallace Thurman's novel Infants of the...