GROTESQUELY BECOMING: TARZAN'S "QUEER HOMINIZATION"

Yet his emergence constitutes, to use Jacques Derrida's phrase, an "inaugural decadence,"7 whose logical extension we meet in the hapless male couple-a professor and his sidekick-whose civilized forgetfulness has rendered them ahuman, and whose lives the ape-man saves from nature's jaws.\n As opposed to Washington's ideals, Du Bois's model will allow the subject to survey ("overlook") national life, and his place, extant and potential, in it, from an encompassing vantage point. For Washington, higher education renders the black subject lethally, embarrassingly maladapted: his two famous images of the black reader are that of a boy in tattered clothes, in a messy hovel, reading French grammar; and that of the "educated Negro" as a black dandy, "with a high hat, imitation gold eye-glasses, a showy walking-stick, kid gloves, fancy boots, and what not," shamelessly making his way in the world "by his wits.