Plato in Folsom Prison

• Author: Josh Vandiver
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716650715

Political Theory

2016, Vol. 44(6) 764 –796

© 2016 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591716650715

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Race

Plato in Folsom Prison:

Eldridge Cleaver, Black

Power, Queer Classicism

Josh Vandiver1

Abstract

Of the many structures which constitute the intellectual architecture of

Black Power, where do “canonical” sources of political theory stand? How

are they incorporated, reworked, and critiqued by the movement’s leading,

innovative thinkers? Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice and Minister of

Information in the Black Panther Party, is certainly such a thinker. Subsequently

scorned or ignored, he sought to advance the African American struggle for

liberty and equality by exposing gendered and sexualized structures of racial

oppression. Cleaver chooses distinctive theoretical tools, a kind of queer

classicism, engaging with Plato’s Symposium and Republic as he develops new

models for understanding the interdiction of black–white erotic relations,

the policing of black masculinity, and the subordination of black persons

within a racialized political order. Analyzing Cleaver’s engagement with

Plato equips us to recognize intersections of classical political theory and

modern radical thought and activism, the limits of such engagements, and the

challenges for political theory when the complex interstices of race, gender,

sexuality, and classicism are interrogated.

Keywords

Eldridge Cleaver, queer, classicism, Plato, Republic, Symposium

1Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Josh Vandiver, Williams College, 24 Hopkins Hall Dr., Williamstown, MA 01267, USA.

Email: jv5@williams.edu

650715PTXXXX10.1177/0090591716650715Political TheoryVandiver

research-article2016

Vandiver 765

They don’t want to put more of us into prison.

– Angela Davis, 1971

The number of black men in prison today exceeds the number of black men in

slavery when it ended.

– Michelle Alexander, 2011

Introduction

“We shall have our manhood,” Eldridge Cleaver announces in Soul on Ice,

“We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”1

Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, founding editor of the

Black Panther newspaper, Cleaver deploys dual meanings of manhood in this

provocative, not to say hyperbolic, declaration. Political, legal “manhood”:

civil rights, access to the vote, equality under the law. Sexual, gendered

“manhood”: the free possession and deployment of one’s own sexual agency.

Dual, but seemingly incongruous, meanings backed by a threat, near to god-

like in its intensity, invoking the mid-century specter of nuclear holocaust—

or the Apocalypse recounted in the Book of Revelation. Why this threat

behind Cleaver’s two demands for manhood? What is the relation between

the two demands? And how does Cleaver’s provocation advance African

American liberty and equality within the Euro-American political order, an

order long conditioned, as Cleaver understood it, by virulent anti-black, gen-

dered, and sexualized political discourses?

These are thorny questions. Cleaver’s political thought is itself a barbed

thicket of intellectual and rhetorical provocations. Is it possible to enter

without being cut? Likely not. On its face, Soul on Ice—Cleaver’s bestsell-

ing masterwork, which catapulted him onto the national stage as a Panther

leader—is wrenchingly masculinist, misogynistic, and homophobic. It has

long been critiqued by a variety of activists and scholars from feminist,

lesbian, and gay perspectives. Rightly so. Yet we cannot quite be done with

Cleaver, just as we cannot quite be done with many other political thinkers

who can be similarly faulted, for Soul on Ice epitomizes a particular mode

of radical political thought with exceptional clarity. Better yet: in your face,

flamboyant Technicolor, every surface heightened into its own spectacle.

The form of Cleaver’s political thought in Soul on Ice is inseparable from

its content. Race, gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, and the very practice

of “doing” political thought, enacting it for and upon a public, all are

revealed in a brilliantly lit display. Cleaver’s thought is often bewilderingly

transverse, shockingly transgressive, agonizingly perverse—in short, it’s

rather queer.

766 Political Theory 44(6)

But back to the surface. At first glance, the Black Panthers appear as the

quintessence of aesthetic and ideological modernism—in styles of dress and

graphic design, for example, and in forms of political writing and speech

indebted to the manifesto, that high-impact vehicle for conveying ideas and

demands. So it comes as a surprise to discover in the culminating section of

Soul on Ice, in which Cleaver gives a mythic account of how sexuality and

gender are racialized in the Euro-American political order, that Cleaver trans-

versally deploys ideas, images, and forms of writing which seem clearly to be

alluding to classical Greek referents. Most obviously, Cleaver reworks the

playwright Aristophanes’s mythic speech on erôs in Plato’s Symposium. I

argue Cleaver is also alluding to the Republic, particularly its stark bifurca-

tion of intellect and desire and the consequences of that bifurcation for Plato’s

theory and its subsequent impact. The Panther traverses many spheres—

personal, political, historical, and theoretical—in queering political theory.

Queer as a verb and a practice, not as an adjective or identity, should hover

over every usage of the term. I do not intend to shoehorn Cleaver or his

thought into the category “queer.” There is no such category. Rather, Cleaver’s

queer modes of political thinking, especially his emphatic focus on racialized

sexualities, expand our understanding of what it means to queer theory. In

turn, while my focus on racialized sexualities as a mode of queering classi-

cism is unique in LGBTQ studies and theory, I affirm recent trends in these

disciplines which over the last two decades have shifted markedly towards

interrogation of their “whiteness” and Eurocentrism.2 I analyze three distinc-

tive features of Cleaver’s queer classicism: his esoteric mode of alluding to

but not naming his classical sources; his excision of essentialized same-sex

elements from Aristophanes’s myth; and the specific Platonic concepts,

images, and forms of writing which Cleaver explores and reworks, including

the concept of to deinon, the uncanny.

In order to appreciate Cleaver’s theoretical intervention, we need to bring

together the study of classical political theory and the study of black political

thought (joining the call by Michael Hanchard in the pages of this journal for

more sustained engagement with the latter) while also questioning the very

demarcations “classical” and “black.”3 Just whose classics are the Greeks,

after all? And what counts as political thought simpliciter? In terms of intel-

lectual architecture, Cleaver’s classicism in Soul on Ice models a richly allu-

sive, postmodernist technique that rearranges classical elements with brio

and verve, flagging thereby the unrestricted theoretical fecundity of Black

Power while simultaneously subjecting the now disaggregated components

of classicism to critical interrogation.4

In addition to studying Cleaver’s multifaceted engagement with Plato, I

conclude by arguing that one pathway towards understanding Cleaver’s