Queer studies is haunted by the spectre of the white gay cosmopolitan man – a figure so discursively powerful that even heterosexuality claims him in the moniker “metrosexual.”Footnote ¹ Several scholars have attempted, since the publication of early works by John D'Emilio and George Chauncey, to critique and even perhaps rid us of this persistent ghost. I do believe that Hiram Pérez's A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire gets us ever so close to doing just that. Pérez fashions gay modernity in collusion with, rather than in opposition to, the US imperialist projects of nation building and transnational capital flows, asking us to “imagine alternative erotic cosmopolitanisms” (3).

With our view firmly fixed upon our modern gay subject as a neocolonial agent, Pérez divests queer theory of its desire to occupy a comfortable home outside global capital, thus extending arguments made by queer theorists of color for the last decade. Returning to the nature of “atavistic desire” – a node once remarked upon by Hortense Spillers (perhaps one of the most influential players in black queer studies via her feminist critique of gender and its reproductive haunts) – Pérez situates his reading of Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924) through the character of the African sailor in that text. Asking not only how homosexual desire “circulates” (27), but also (at least implicitly) how it moves us to respond, Pérez argues for the African's importance as a brief encounter – a space that quickly gets abandoned so that Billy Budd can become the stand-in eroticized subject. This reading offers up several new scenarios for queer studies. First, it allows for a proscenium to evolve where the “eroticized exotic” (30) primitive and the child seem to nourish an emerging, if not nascent, gay male subjectivity (although one could even contest the gendered nature of Pérez's argument here). But Pérez's encounter with Billy Budd does not yield the classic closeted character; instead, he wants us to underestimate the work of the closet here as a founding trope of gay subjectivity. Pérez offers instead that the scene of looking and hailing and remarking upon the black body in Melville's cosmos identifies an open exchange, a marketplace or scaffolding for the very rites of gay passage that we presume to represent the coming of modernity for (gay) queer life. Given what we know about the (African) sailor's figuring of other historical events – the prosecution of Washington Goode for murder by Melville's father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, in 1849, for starters – we can see that the implications for constructions of modern gay subjectivity are very impactful on more nuanced theorizing about queer subjects in general.

One of the most unlikely pairings in critical work, Pérez's reading of James Baldwin's “Going to Meet the Man” (1965) alongside the photographs taken at and narratives of Abu Ghraib, is both novel and risky. While many queer theorists call for utilizing the methodological tools of black studies to unpack intersectional paradigms, few critics ever follow suit. In this case, scholars of queer studies will be pleasantly surprised to see how Pérez takes Baldwin's method of unpacking sex/race/gender/desire and uses it to sustain his approach to what subtends our ability to read what we are seeing when looking at pictures from Abu Ghraib. Through his explication of Baldwin's short story, and what it reveals about the kind of desire engendered by the black body – and I would almost want to say here, black body parts – it becomes clear that notions of the pornographic and its role in ideologies of looking in US culture are cemented in structures of lynching. This reading puts A Taste for Brown Bodies in some conversation with Jacqueline Goldsby's A Spectacular Secret and its sense that lynching was not only an extralegal practice, but a kind of technological revolution that ushered in that state we now refer to as “modernity.”Footnote ² Therefore Pérez reads Abu Ghraib images “not as aberrations but as constructions symptomatic of the homoerotics of empire” that in turn make it possible for “ritualized sexual violence [to be] deployed as a means of securing self-ownership and privacy” (70, 71). In short, the implicit point here is that desire is a key component in the making of settler colonialist structures, and that, simultaneously, this same desire is rendered unknowable or outside the very structure it subtends.

“Queer theory is very particular about the kinds of trouble with which it troubles itself,” writes Pérez in a chapter reflecting upon the now infamous 2003 University of Michigan Gay Shame conference (97). It is in this chapter that we get Pérez's first attempts at defining exactly what “brown” is or might refer to in this project. With brown situated outside the sometimes “naturalized classes” (103) of white, black or Asian, Pérez uses it to mark the ascendancy of the modern and gay, presupposing this entity to be both “resistant and ecstatic” (105). In fact, Pérez troubles the term “gay” and its trace elements, noting that to be “gay” is indeed synonymous with travel. Pérez's insightful – and, yes, painful – interrogation of conference participants’ responses to him during and after in published pieces demonstrates not only how gay modern bodies can travel, but also how they can carry the full intentions of global capital and its fetishes. Pérez's work is meant to destabilize the intended stabilization of queer-of-color within establishmentarian work on queer studies. We speak, in short, but do they ever listen?

Inspired by Pérez's work at the Gay Shame conference, I traveled across town in Chicago to participate in the Pleasure and Danger conference at Northwestern some years later. Once again, queer theory seemed to be packaged as that thing possessed by a pervasive whiteness. Once again, “we” were called upon to respond. I prefaced my remarks with the following: “At least once in my life I'd like to get fucked by a gay man and enjoy it.” I went on after that to mark the overt and subtle ways in which queer discursive interventions always already carry traces of empire with them. I wanted participants to feel my queerness – I wanted to question what is so dangerous and pleasure-able about how we occupy our convenient spaces of anti-heteronormativity, as we continually reproduce the “us” and “them” of empire by enacting our discrete categories of “gay” and “lesbian” within “queer.” I am not sure if folks heard me much beyond that cheeky opening salvo, but, like reading A Taste for Brown Bodies, I certainly did enjoy it at the time.

The last two chapters of Hiram Pérez's book exemplify its author's propensity for feisty intellectual combat and provocative complexity. The penultimate chapter rages against a 2003 conference on Gay Shame at the University of Michigan because Pérez was “the only invited queer person of color” (98) on the slate of speakers. The experience convinced him that “establishmentarian” queer theory was averse to “thinking race” (124) – or could only think of race in a way that subordinated nonwhite persons and cultures to a white gay male Euro-American (nominally cosmopolitan) subjectivity. More than a decade after the conference, despite the antiestablishmentarian growth of “queer of color critique” (124), Pérez insists that “the brown body … remains … shut out of the university classroom” and “increasingly finds itself expelled from civil society – if not expelled outright from the nation” (119). His remedy for such shutouts, it seems clear, is not only more queer thought about brown bodies but also an increased empirical inclusion of them everywhere. Pérez's argument is thereby invested in identity politics, which he thinks gay cosmopolitanism wrongly scorns as outdated.

Despite his identity-inspired rage, however, Pérez is not fixated on identity. His chapter demanding the material presence of brown bodies is succeeded by an ultimate chapter about white gay cowboys in Annie Proulx's fiction and in the Proulx-derived film Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2005). Pérez finds cowboys, despite their material whiteness, to be brown by analogy. The vaquero was originally “a mestizo figure”; the US cowboy “was often black”; and the cowboy resisted heteronormative marriage. All this “arguably queer[s] the body of the cowboy” (138) – and queers whiteness too. Accordingly, Pérez defends Proulx's character Ennis del Mar against the grain of assessments by “the respectable gay morality of contemporary assimilationist politics” (146). The respectable morality, another symptom for Pérez of cosmopolite values, describes Ennis as closeted or homophobic because he, unlike his lover Jack Twist, wants a heterosexual rather than a gay marriage, and desires only occasional resort to Jack. Pace Jack and his advocates, Pérez champions Ennis's desire. As Pérez reads it, it models and values a non-domesticated love that is transitory and intermittent – and in Ennis's life and context, Pérez argues, transience is queer love's more imaginative, more intense, mode. White Ennis is another brown body for whom we should have a taste.

Pérez defends his analytic modus operandi as “provocations that nonetheless cleave to provocations of the texts at hand” (131). If one text provokes him to emphasize empirical realities, and another provokes him to emphasize speculative figurations, the resulting flexible mobility of perspective seems the right match for his aim to subvert illusive unities – such as the unified subjectivities (whether personal, racial, national, or universal) that Pérez believes coopt even queer theory. Should any of his perspectives overstep the limits of logic and tact, Pérez acknowledges the danger. Concerning the use of analogy he says, “I remain cautious about [its] use … as a critical practice and its own potential violences” (50). He points out that José Martí’s classic “Our America” (1891) is a cautionary exemplum: it “requires a strictly metaphorical understanding of race that represses a history of racial domination in Cuba” (89). The analyst therefore must “resist the tendency of analogy to rigidify the elements of its comparison even as it … destabilizes them ontologically” (52). As if to guarantee avoidance of Martí’s discursive violence, Pérez denominates the very brown bodies on which his book depends as “provisional”: “I make use of ‘brown’ provisionally … – and tactically – to demystify how bodies are situated outside white/black or white/Asian binaries to consolidate cosmopolitan first-world identities” (103). He wants to keep the object of his taste simultaneously demystified and indefinite, because he does not want to assert a “property claim” over “brown bodies,” a phrase which he describes as “nearly as vague” a “racial descriptor” as “the category ‘Latino’” (117). “My deployment of ‘brownness’ remains deliberately slippery” (14).

Yet a deliberate slipperiness, however well fitted to a slippery Ennis or his like, constitutes a threat to the reliability of Pérez's project. His caution does not prevail. Discursive slidings overshoot both his empirical and his analogy-based claims. As a preface to a chapter considering an “imperial homoerotics” (69) at work in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Pérez first states his worries about analogy, then goes on to invoke James Baldwin's “Going to Meet the Man” (1965). He wants to wrest a guiding analysis – and perhaps a metaphor – for Abu Ghraib from Baldwin's tale of a horrific primal scene: the hanging and castrating of a black man witnessed by a white boy. The boy grows up to be a violent racist sheriff, sexually impotent unless he fantasizes his possession of a black phallus. Pérez, after acutely cleaving to the homosexual aspect of the story's details, takes the text as proof that “[d]esire for the black man's body generates white male sexualities” (65) and that “a ‘national-normative’ sexuality originates from a violently racialized erotics” (73). Abu Ghraib is to be read, therefore, not only in the light of the empirical history of lynching in the US, but according to a cause-and-effect genesis of sexual desire. Pérez wants his reader to accept that structure as historically true, even though it is hypothetical, and its proof in this case is a narrative fiction. The license he gives metaphor permits his movement from fiction to history, to be sure. But here the movement does not oppose a rigidification of analogy, because it stabilizes what Pérez proposes – and believes – is a social and sexual ontology. His rigidifying response to Abu Ghraib is intensified by his noting an “absence of images of Iraqi women prisoners” (66) – an absence that for Pérez is further evidence of “a constitutive homoerotic underside to imperial sexuality” (74). This absence turns out to involve Baldwin. Baldwin inspires Pérez, but he also earns Pérez's censure: “Baldwin's privileging of the castrated black male body … is complicit in silencing the sanctioned rape of black women” (52).

The worst side of Pérez's provocative strategy is its way of dealing out “complicity” repeatedly and, as in the rhetorically violent assertion above about Baldwin, as a tautological substitute for argued evidence. Gay modernity is “complicit” with US empire (9), “homonationalism” is complicit with empire (11), Eve Sedgwick was “complicit with nationalist and imperialist projects” (35), queer theory must “interrogat[e] the complicity demanded by institutionalization” (109). This way of treating terms or opponents or opposing ideas undermines thoughtfulness, and betrays Pérez's capacity for flexible rigor. What motivates the betrayal is understandable: an urgently activist political desire to set the world's sorry state right. But the world is in a sorry state because stupidity and nonsense rule it. Our obligation as academics is to think harder and better than the world outside – and, even if “politics” is at stake, not to take short cuts. “Complicity” is one.

I want to thank the editors of the Journal of American Studies for commissioning this roundtable and Sharon Holland and Robert Caserio for their generosity in agreeing to read and review my book. I welcome this occasion to return to and reevaluate some of the major claims of A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire.

Holland helpfully locates a critical genealogy for my book in the writing of Hortense Spillers, and it is worth reiterating here how foundational black and women-of-color feminisms are to queer-of-color critique. The candor of Holland's frustrations with queer studies illuminates continued tensions in the field over the consequence of race and gender analysis. She commiserates about the “pervasive whiteness” of queer theory and laments, “We speak, in short, but do they ever listen?” Regardless of whether or not they listen, I remain grateful that scholars like Holland so trenchantly persist in disrupting the whiteness of establishmentarian queer studies (and the academy more generally). I listen and I learn. Because she so elegantly glosses my arguments about the relation of gay modernity to US empire, I wish to use this space to briefly elaborate on the “brown bodies” of the book's title, especially given the present political moment. I use “brown” to designate actual bodies perceived or described as such but also to shift from those bodies to the realm of fantasy in order to consider how “brownness” enthralls modern gay male identity, but also animates it. I began to formulate my analysis of the brown body in 2003, in response to the disconcertingly symptomatic race politics at the University of Michigan's Gay Shame conference. That analysis appeared as an essay in a 2005 special issue of the journal Social Text, an essay since adapted for my book. As I originally formulated, the brown body represents an ambiguity (or productive opacity) that exceeds modern categorizations of physical anthropology and state racial and ethnic designations (black, Latino/a, Asian, Native American, Arab, etc. …) but does not exclude them. (Any body of any race can occupy a position of brownness; brown operates in relation to modern.) I propose that a cosmopolitan imagination idealizes the brown body as a primitive figure at once desirable and abject, an atavistic fantasy and the object of disowned projections cast temporally backward and spacialized onto geographic regions globally (geography as “an alternative reading of ego,” to borrow a formulation from Spillers).Footnote ¹ The cosmopolitan imagination locates in “brownness” the exotic, savage, pansexual, romantic, and abject, but also a dangerousness that marks the ontological limits of the modern (white) subject. Brownness threatens to reveal its animation of the gay cosmopolitan's modern sensibility.

What I first wrote in 2005 is no less true today: “the ambiguity designated here as ‘brown’ is opportunistically and systemically deployed at times of crisis – as instanced by the intensified race profiling authorized by 9/11” (104). Presently we are experiencing the renewed amplification of such a deployment as a consequence of the white nationalism inspired and emboldened by Donald Trump's presidency. It is as crucial now as ever to think the relationship between racialization and fantasy (including the libidinal), especially if we are to critically understand the multifold ways we may find ourselves enlisted by a settler-colonial, white supremacist state and its promises of inclusion. With the brown body, I demonstrate a means for thinking race as a verb (as legal scholar Kendall Thomas urges), not as a departure from identity politics but rather as an engagement with the affective economies – primarily the erotic – that crystallize race into identity. Until the interventions of queer-of-color analysis, black queer studies, queer indigenous studies, etc. …, queer theory dismissed such engagements as politically and intellectually provincial. Some scholars of queer studies persist in rejecting like interventions.

The gravest criticism Caserio makes of my work is that I take “short cuts” in treating “opponents or opposing ideas.” Specifically he references my use of the term “complicity” as such a short cut, citing my discussions of works by Eve Sedgwick and James Baldwin. It should be clear from my book how much I admire Sedgwick and Baldwin (especially Baldwin). My awareness that much of the work I do in the book is made possible by the contributions of these two writers, I think, is equally clear. But my admiration for their remarkable work does not make their words sacrosanct. I am often disturbed by academia's peculiar culture of tribute. One's admiration – or love – for the critic and her work should generate engagement, not devotion. Too often I have encountered from queer scholars (very often gay white men) a kind of piety regarding Sedgwick, an attitude that strikes me as ultimately disrespectful of the critic's legacy in its lack of more sober engagement. In the case of Baldwin and questions I raise about the political work of his short story, “Going to Meet the Man,” my deliberation on the treatment of black women in his writing is hardly novel, and readers might also refer to scholarship by Trudier Harris and to the famous exchange between Baldwin and Audre Lorde in a 1984 issue of Essence magazine. More importantly, however, it is crucial for me to mark the restrictions of the critical paradigm I locate in Baldwin in order to understand what limitations I inherit and potentially reproduce in my reading of Abu Ghraib. Finally, I think much of the work of my book is directed at uncovering complicities that we neglect, excuse, or actively obscure, particularly as queer or gay-identified men, moving us away from uninterrogated narratives of marginalization and perhaps most significantly the discourse of the presumably non-identitarian (too often a white universalist sleight of hand). It is important to recognize, as Anna Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara Spira remind us, that “the violence and death we authorize and face operate through and within our libidinal, erotic, and affective investments, investments that we must engage directly and rigorously if we are to disrupt the seductive workings of power in their most intimate dimensions.”Footnote ² This is the significance, too, of Holland's warning that “queer discursive interventions always already carry traces of empire with them.” As I state in my book, one of my goals is for queer critique to revitalize the radical political potential that its various institutionalizations risk conceding.