Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 443 progressive multiculturalist/internationalist versus him as an oldtime racist/imperialist—could both find ample evidences supporting their opposed assertions.56 While traditionally critics have tried to explain this away by attributing it to the seemingly entrenched split between Leaves and Whitman’s prose works, this could work only to an extent as more and more critical readings reveal Leaves to be far from innocent on these matters. Therefore, rather than seeking to determine at pains which represents the real Whitman, the historicist parallel reading undertaken here propose that we accept the possibility that both might be equally valid concerning him, and seeks to affirm this ambivalence by contextualizing it within a bigger picture, namely the bifacial US liberal stance on both domestic race issues and the international cause of democracy that gradually took shape during the nineteenth century and eventually became dominant. From this perspective, Whitman’s ambivalent racial attitudes and internationalism bordering on imperialism in effect can be said to have pretty accurately grasped (or even actively contributed to) the American mainstream “faultline” of entertaining not only a utopian idealism of multicultural diversity that has paradoxically coexisted with the harsh reality of racial hierarchy and quotidian racism,57 but also a promotion of global democracy that 56 This is especially elaborate and telling in his stance toward the African American people. See, for example, Klammer (2006) and Folsom (2000) on the side of seeing Whitman as racist, and Wilson (2018) and Li (1993, 1994) on that seeing him as much better. But even for these critics firmly on either side, they still acknowledge some exceptions to their general judgement (see Klammer [1995] for the intriguing case of 1855 edition, and Li [1993: 183-184] for one case of racist slur on Asians). For a metacritical analysis of this critical quandary, see Outka (2002: 293-301). As to Whitman as internationalist or imperialist, see Grünzweig for both an early critique of Whitman’s internationalism as imperialism (1996) and a later reappraisal of his imperialism as globalism (2018). Grünzweig’s shifts of attitude are symptomatic of Whitman’s ambiguities and ambivalences tackled here, though his justification for them has more to do with the changing situations of his own critical enunciations (2018: 249-250). 57 See Ali Behdad’s succinct analysis, along similar lines, of how Leaves “has remained a powerful ur-text for the discourse of multiculturalism in the United States” (2005: 79). For the useful critical concept of “faultline,” see Sinfield (1992:
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