The Proud Badge of Shame: Leslie Fiedler's Literary Homonationalism

Grounding our panel in the history of Americanist criticism, Ashley Barnes’ paper proposes that Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) might be read as a first step toward aesthetic homonationalism.... [ view full abstract ]

Grounding our panel in the history of Americanist criticism, Ashley Barnes’ paper proposes that Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) might be read as a first step toward aesthetic homonationalism. Here, Fiedler famously positions a cross-racial same-sex desire as the engine of American literary value, treating unconsummated desire between Huck and Jim as emblematic of the great American novel. This homonationalist aesthetic is, of course, conservative: only the guilt-racked straight white male can translate national bad conscience into art. Yet Barnes argues that Fiedler’s analysis lets us critique homonationalism, too. If Love and Death validates straight white fantasies, it also shows how those fantasies instrumentalize the dark-skinned victim who must play the white man’s healer. Moreover, if Fiedler endorses a gothic aesthetic of hidden depth, he also exposes the Protestant anti-Catholic hypocrisy that drives that aesthetic, critiquing the dogmatism that (like Islamophobia today) casts a foreign faith as a threat to democracy.