Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 445 he “represents himself as despising the American state quite as much as he requires the American nation.”60 In effect, in order to survive and even to change their situations, minorities in the US have long learned, like Thoreau did, to put themselves in the national center as the best possible strategy.61 After all, as Alan Sinfield insightfully remarks concerning Tony Kushner’s quickly canonized play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1993, 1994): “it seems that only one theme is prized in US writing: the history, condition and destiny of ‘America’” (1999: 206). Therefore, it is arguably because Whitman’s stance on race issues and international democracy colluded so perfectly with the soon-to-be-dominant US ideology that he was eventually granted the canonical status as the American poet, which then as a corollary facilitated the widespread transmission of his transgressive homotextuality and homopolitics. Yet this collusion with the American nation, from today’s perspective, would inevitably lend itself to a critique of homonationalism as sharply conceptualized by Jasbir K. Puar (2007). 62 For, in this line of collateral causality, Whitman’s internationalist call for democratic camaraderie would be so deeply bundled with the American national ideology that any positive response would entail a subscription to his Americanist stance, or at least to a certain acceptance of the American cultural hegemony. Of course, Whitman’s internationalist (para-homosexual) camaraderie propagated as an progressive coalition led by the US 60 Abelove thus insightfully interprets Queer Nation not in terms of separatism but in its “claim to [national] centrality” (2003: 40): i.e., “What Queer Nation really means is America” (41). 61 For an enlightening illustration of this, see Edward Whitley’s American Bards, a comparative study of Whitman and three other “unlikely candidates for national poet,” all of whom belonged to minorities but “positioned themselves with respect to the nation much as Whitman did” (2010: ix). However, Whitley’s discussion of them ventures beyond the national and focuses mainly on their sub-national and supranational affiliations. 62 However, as far as I know, there are not as yet any critics who use this very term for a critique of Whitman, even though they are already driving at that direction. See Meiners (2018), Rimby (2021).
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