Papers by Elisabeth Windle
I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people, and I consider it a happy task to finally have t... more I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people, and I consider it a happy task to finally have the space and time to thank them properly. First among these, of course, is my advisor Anca Parvulescu. Her charm, kindness, wit, and intellect are unparalleled, and I am a better scholar because I have been able to study with her. She has taught me about pedagogy-about how much of good teaching is listening closely and listening well-and about scholarly style, both written and embodied. During the years I worked on this project, Anca's incisive questions about gender, modernism, cultural studies, critical theory, and a host of other things guided me to deeper and more complex thinking. She is exceptional at what she does, and she has been an exceptional advisor, colleague, and friend to me. I am fortunate to have had Bill Maxwell's guidance from the beginning. It was in a class with him that I discovered Richard Bruce Nugent, and this project was born. Bill's influence is all across this dissertation, and the dissertation is better for it. Vivian Pollak reignited my interest in Whitman, and encouraged the admittedly wacky questions I was asking about him and around him. Both personally and professionally, she has been enormously supportive of me over the past seven years, provided a model for agile and capacious thinking, and, perhaps most importantly, never failed to make me laugh. Melanie Micir offered exceptionally good advice at every stage of this project. I appreciate her attention to an embarrassingly early draft of chapter four, even while she was on leave. Conversations with Jeffrey McCune-and reading his field-defining work-have left chapter two in much better shape than it began. A class I audited with Amber Musser when I was deep into this dissertation reminded me why queer theory is important, and vi something. For most of the past two decades, Taylor has been my partner in life, and I've depended on his sometimes tough, often critical, always loving support all the way through.
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2017
MELUS, 2016
The 2004 film Brother to Brother, written and directed by Rodney Evans, presents a fictionalized ... more The 2004 film Brother to Brother, written and directed by Rodney Evans, presents a fictionalized account of the final months of the life of Harlem Renaissance artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. Interspersed among scenes of the elderly Nugent (Roger Robinson) mentoring a young artist, Perry Williams (Anthony Mackie), are black-and-white flashbacks to 1926, the year the young Nugent (Duane Boutte), along with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston, conceived of, created, and published what became the only issue of Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. In a scene from the film’s present day, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Perry and the older Nugent sit on the floor in the hallway of the now dilapidated and abandoned Niggeratti Manor, where several of the Fire!! contributors lived during the 1920s. Nugent narrates Thurman’s death from alcoholism, and then Perry asks him what happened to the others. Nugent nostalgically replies: “I still saw them, but after that, it wasn’t the same. Times changed. The Depression set in and people really thought our excesses was [sic] what brought it on. It never really was the same. That sense of risk and magic was gone.” The “sense” to which Nugent refers here is marked as queer—risky, magical, and excessive— and no longer exists in the present. As he longs for the queer past, he provides a thoroughly nostalgic historical narrative; indeed, nostalgic feeling characterizes the film as a whole. At first glance, the two storylines in the film neatly parallel each other: Perry, coming of age at the end of the twentieth century, and the young Nugent, coming of age at the beginning of the twentieth century, negotiate their intersecting identities with difficulty. However, nostalgia prevails in the contrast between these two historical moments. It is Perry’s contemporary moment—one in which he is thrown out of his family’s home because he is gay, racially fetishized by an insensitive white lover, and beaten by a group of homophobic classmates—rather than Nugent’s historical moment that is positioned as more untenable for the gay black artist. Starting from this historical contrast, what follows is an exploration of black queer nostalgia in the film Brother to
Douglas McGrath’s 2006 film Infamous recounts Truman Capote’s research travels to Kansas in the l... more Douglas McGrath’s 2006 film Infamous recounts Truman Capote’s research travels to Kansas in the late 1950s. In opposition to the effemiphobic rhetoric of many contemporary gay cultures, Infamous highlights Capote’s effeminacy and his relationships with women as creatively and personally productive, offering nostalgic alternatives both to the gay cultural attachment to masculinity and to powerful historical narratives about the inherent abjection of queerness at mid-century. However, even as Infamous exposes, celebrates, and aestheticizes Capote’s effeminacy and the male homosexuality that it evidences, it simultaneously renders race invisible. The figure of Truman Capote thus becomes a kind of historical shorthand for the nexus of whiteness, male homosexuality, and effeminacy. In other words, the depiction of Capote’s mid-century gay effeminacy in Infamous functions at once to destabilize, in a nostalgic key, the effemiphobia of some forms of contemporary gay culture even as it re-instantiates the presumed whiteness of gay male effeminacy.
2016 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award
This article intervenes in queer theoretical approaches t... more 2016 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award
This article intervenes in queer theoretical approaches to nostalgia through an analysis of the 2004 film Brother to Brother, which presents a fictionalized account of the final months of the life of Harlem Renaissance artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. One reading of this film would insist that it merely substantiates the claims made in other contexts by a number of queer theorists that nostalgia is bad history and worse theory—uncomplicated, weak, sentimental. However, this article offers an alternate reading, which reaches beyond accusations of sentimentality and historical inaccuracy to insist that the nostalgia ultimately prevailing in Brother to Brother functions as an anti-racist and anti-homophobic rejoinder to paranoia about the so-called “down-low” phenomenon, which obsessed the media and the public during the early 2000s.
In Brother to Brother, the central problem for Nugent’s protégé, a young, black, gay artist named Perry, is negotiating his membership in two contested identity categories often understood to be in tension. His intersectional identity makes impossible the kinds of community he desires. In contrast, Nugent’s 1920s moment, depicted in black and white flashback, makes available to the young Nugent exactly those pleasures, communities, and opportunities inaccessible to Perry. This article argues that the film therefore negotiates black gay identity at the turn of the millennium—an identity category under siege from a number of directions—in and through nostalgia for the gay Harlem Renaissance.
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Papers by Elisabeth Windle
This article intervenes in queer theoretical approaches to nostalgia through an analysis of the 2004 film Brother to Brother, which presents a fictionalized account of the final months of the life of Harlem Renaissance artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. One reading of this film would insist that it merely substantiates the claims made in other contexts by a number of queer theorists that nostalgia is bad history and worse theory—uncomplicated, weak, sentimental. However, this article offers an alternate reading, which reaches beyond accusations of sentimentality and historical inaccuracy to insist that the nostalgia ultimately prevailing in Brother to Brother functions as an anti-racist and anti-homophobic rejoinder to paranoia about the so-called “down-low” phenomenon, which obsessed the media and the public during the early 2000s.
In Brother to Brother, the central problem for Nugent’s protégé, a young, black, gay artist named Perry, is negotiating his membership in two contested identity categories often understood to be in tension. His intersectional identity makes impossible the kinds of community he desires. In contrast, Nugent’s 1920s moment, depicted in black and white flashback, makes available to the young Nugent exactly those pleasures, communities, and opportunities inaccessible to Perry. This article argues that the film therefore negotiates black gay identity at the turn of the millennium—an identity category under siege from a number of directions—in and through nostalgia for the gay Harlem Renaissance.
This article intervenes in queer theoretical approaches to nostalgia through an analysis of the 2004 film Brother to Brother, which presents a fictionalized account of the final months of the life of Harlem Renaissance artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. One reading of this film would insist that it merely substantiates the claims made in other contexts by a number of queer theorists that nostalgia is bad history and worse theory—uncomplicated, weak, sentimental. However, this article offers an alternate reading, which reaches beyond accusations of sentimentality and historical inaccuracy to insist that the nostalgia ultimately prevailing in Brother to Brother functions as an anti-racist and anti-homophobic rejoinder to paranoia about the so-called “down-low” phenomenon, which obsessed the media and the public during the early 2000s.
In Brother to Brother, the central problem for Nugent’s protégé, a young, black, gay artist named Perry, is negotiating his membership in two contested identity categories often understood to be in tension. His intersectional identity makes impossible the kinds of community he desires. In contrast, Nugent’s 1920s moment, depicted in black and white flashback, makes available to the young Nugent exactly those pleasures, communities, and opportunities inaccessible to Perry. This article argues that the film therefore negotiates black gay identity at the turn of the millennium—an identity category under siege from a number of directions—in and through nostalgia for the gay Harlem Renaissance.