448 EURAMERICA useful but in effect irreplaceable by others, hence making himself indispensable despite whatever problems there were with his works. Which obviously also explains the unreserved admiration of him by African American writers of the early twentieth century. In a series of articles (Hutchinson, 1989, 1992, 1994) demonstrating Whitman’s influence on the Harlem Renaissance writers (like Langston Hughes, many of whom not only adored Whitman but even declared themselves his “descendants” [Hutchinson, 1994: 212]), George B. Hutchinson enlighteningly demonstrates how those writers and critics did not take offense at Whitman’s representations of African Americans that critics have found problematic today; and, if that was because of a failure to notice, they did not change their positions on the matter even when informed of those problematic aspects.68 In an uncanny historical coincidence, does not this mixed response also reflect back upon the disavowed challenge facing the critical stance of homonationalism itself, namely that not too ago (or even today) the metropolitan promotions of the worldwide LGBT causes thus critiqued actually were (or still are) regarded as extremely helpful by people around the globe who have been prejudiced against or even persecuted just for being so identified? Apparently political critiques targeting the domestic and the international are not always neatly aligned, and those launched from different positions often require different, hence sometimes conflicting, uses of the same resources. As Hutchinson rightly explains the multivalence of Whitman’s oeuvre: “This is as attributable to the interests, needs, and imaginations of his readers and the contexts in which they read him 68 As late as the 1950s, Hughes still glorified Whitman as “Negroes’ First Great Poetic Friend, Lincoln of Letters,” whom “Negroes should read and remember” (as cited in Klammer, 1995: 1). Even after an African American professor of English pointed out the “truth” of Whitman’s problematic racial stances, Hughes still stood his ground and defended his position thus: “[Many great people] have not always been great men and women in their every day thoughts, speech or ways of living,” but it is “the best of him that we choose to keep and cherish, not his worst” (as cited in Klammer, 1995: 2). See also Wilson’s discussion (2014).
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