Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James

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      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Jefferson-James, LaToya, 1981- author.

      Title: Masculinity under construction : literary re-presentations of black

      masculinity in the African diaspora / LaToya Jefferson-James.

      Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical

       references and index. | Summary: "Masculinity Under Construction

      analyzes Black male identity through the works of various authors from

      Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The book discusses the works

      of canonical Black authors from the pan-African diaspora in order to

      identify similarities in the construction of male identity in global

      Black communities"-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020007654 (print) | LCCN 2020007655 (ebook) | ISBN

      9781793615299 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793615305 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Masculinity in literature. | Blacks in literature. |

      African literature--Black authors--History and criticism. | American

      literature--African American authors--History and criticism. | Caribbean

      literature--Black authors--History and criticism.

      Classification: LCC PN56.M316 J44 2020 (print) | LCC PN56.M316 (ebook) |

      DDC 809/.933521108996--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007654

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007655

      Foreword

      Like every other burgeoning American academic, I would like to claim total authenticity for this text. I would like to say that this text is new, exciting, and an unmistakable radical revision of my entire theoretical field—Black masculinity in anti/postcolonial texts. While it is true that I have been thinking on this subject matter and reading these canonical texts for well over a decade, I did not arrive at any of these conclusions as a lone, American (rather African American) academic. To the contrary, many of my observation have been influenced by the works of Una Marson, James Baldwin, Raewyn Connell, Michael Kimmel, Maryse Conde, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire, J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant, A. Benitez-Rojo, F. Abiola Irele, Adetayo Alabi, C. L. R. James, Honor Ford-Smith, Alison Donnell, Gail Bederman, El Hajj Malik Shabazz, Sembene Ousmane, Walter Rodney, Elsa Goveia, Wole Soyinka, Mariama Ba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Lorraine Hansberry, Patricia Hill Collins, Patricia Williams, Chinua Achebe, George Lamming, Bessie Head, and Earl Lovelace. This is not an exhaustive list, but my dear Reader, I feel you understand by now.

      While I am ultimately proud of the work that I am putting forth, I am also saddened by some of the things that I was not able to include. For example, I did not include any poetry. Poetry, by its nature, is deserving of its own book-length study and certainly not a single chapter in this one. Because I decided to end this text at some point in some time, I excluded several equally deserving authors. For instance, I did not include Merle Hodge, I missed including the subversive laughter of Maryse Conde, and Peepal Tree Publishers recently reprinted two early plays of Una Marson that are in need of analyzing for the gender dynamics and representations of the African Diaspora included in both of these early twentieth century productions. And while I have attempted to de-essentialize the African American experience as the Black experience, I have not included Black Hispanic writers. It was not for carelessness that I omitted these writers—rather it is out of my nervousness surrounding the nature of this project. Admittedly, most of the theoretical and primary writers who inform my thought are overwhelmingly Anglophone or Francophone both in the Caribbean and Africa. Perhaps Black Hispanic writers will appear if there is an updated edition?

      Dear Reader, with all of the aforementioned deletions, I do not aim to make you feel that reading (and hopefully teaching) this text is a waste of time. First, as much as I would like to claim the clear objectivity of a seasoned academic, this text is as much a product of lifelong, unanswered questions and a conscientious objection of certain concepts as it is the product of an insatiable intellectual curiosity about literature and aesthetics. This text was prompted by several events that occurred during my turbulent, American adolescence. As junior high school students, we were all told by Black teachers that Black males would be extinct by our twenty-fifth birthdays and we would have no one to marry. Because Black males were “endangered species,” we would not be future wives and mothers; therefore, we would be left unfulfilled as people. Well, I laughed and informed my equally overwhelmed friends that God had created a veritable rainbow of men and they were all there for my choosing. I would marry who I wanted, I declared, regardless of skin color. But, the impression those assemblies left upon me were real. Where were our teachers receiving such dire, animalistic pronouncements about the collective doom of Black men, and why did they feel that lifelong singlehood was a threat to women? I did not see it as a threat: I knew several Black women who never married or who were widowed long before I was born. Some had children and some did not, but all of these women were seemingly whole people who led full lives—without husbands.

      Once again, in high school, the subject of Black males as endangered species was introduced to us via an assembly in the school gymnasium. Once again, I said more than a few things that should have landed me in the principal’s office. I asked someone, “If Black males are ‘species,’ where are the nature reserves, tracking tags, and computer programs that would study them? Who is trying to help them repopulate?” When we were in elementary school, we learned about all of these efforts to save the American bald eagle: where were the efforts to save the endangered Black male? In my adolescent words, which were the result of my adolescent anger and reasoning, I was simply trying to articulate a scientific fact rather than a sociological construction: Black men are not animals. While I understood that we were at the height of a crack epidemic and the homicide rate of Black men by Black male perpetrators was sky-rocketing in a way that many African Americans had never witnessed before, I still did not and do not understand what purpose these assemblies served. The young men sitting next to us in class were mostly silly and a little arrogant, but they were not animals. While many of my male classmates consumed gangsta rap at the time, it was strictly a form of entertainment. We knew a few who had dropped out of school and were engaging in