할렘 르네상스의 퀴어 작가 리차드 브루스 누전트의 『젠틀맨 지거』—인종과 섹슈얼리티의 경계 넘기

초록

This essay positions Richard Bruce Nugent’s little-studied novel Gentleman Jigger as a crucial queer novel of the Harlem Renaissance, though it was published posthumously in 2008. The novel traces the process of Stuartt Brennan’s coming to affirm both his racial hybridity and his gay sexuality at a time when black and white were mutually exclusive identity categories and black elites, prioritizing the race problem, largely either condemned homosexuality or, at best, tolerated it. In the novel’s first half, Nugent focuses on Stuart’s grappling with his status as racially hybrid in Harlem; the second half traces his social, financial, and sexual success beyond that community. After experiencing life outside Harlem, Stuartt can embrace his racial hybridity and homosexuality, but the novel reveals Nugent’s limit as he ignores Stuartt’s oppression of and prejudice against women. Ultimately, the essay argues, Gentleman Jigger offers an important precursor for contemporary engagements with questions of intersectionality and with the meanings of racial and sexual passing.

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