Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
masculinity and the destructive, predatory behavior this type of identity entails. Finally, this book analyzes texts by Black male writers who offer alternative masculine identities. The conclusion returns the reader to a very bitter public dispute between James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver which remains unresolved. The two argued over how, exactly, to portray Black males. It appears that Cleaver did not approve of any homosexual images in the literature while Baldwin, himself openly gay, argues that Cleaver’s very opposition is two-dimensional, reactionary, and misogynistic. It is the type of masculine model doomed to failure within respective African communities.
While this book does analyze canonical writers, it explores them from a specifically masculinist standpoint, which offers a new perspective of them. For example, another reading on Okonkwo’s anxiety in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart would be boring. I explore the warnings Okonkwo received from his peer, Obierika, and several elder men of his tribe and his mother’s tribe concerning his selfish, individualistic perception of manhood which simply does not exist in his tribe. One more book chapter devoted to Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and its commentary of Chicago’s discriminatory housing practices would be trite. I explore the struggle of a wife and mother to reveal to her husband and son, respectively, that his masculine identity is built upon exploitation and can only lead to destruction and alienation. Those protagonists who cling to individualism are doomed to fail at any enterprise at the least, or they die or commit suicide in extreme cases: those who struggle toward gender complementarity and communal-based notions of manhood live.
Chapter 1, “Racialized Degendering: Creating the Black Brute in the Shadows of Enlightenment” is a chapter that details the reading strategy and terminology used here. First, men of African descent have a long history of using literature as an antislavery, anticolonial weapon and of galvanizing themselves globally through various Black unity movements: Zionism, Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and the Black Arts Movement were all articulated as unifying, intellectual combat against demoralizing pictures of Black life in literature produced by the hegemony. Black men were in frequent conversation with one another. In literature produced by Black men, it is not uncommon to read a Caribbean text that references both African American and African authors. Whereas Enlightenment philosophers claimed Black Africans produced no history, Black male activists, philosophers, and writers countered that it was European philosophers who refused to acknowledge that history. It was notions of European superiority and its desire for economic dominance which coated the seed of Enlightenment with its own demise. This chapter also draws upon Glissant’s transversal history. While there are many divergences within cultures of the African Diaspora, there are continuities that deserve the same critical attention. Pedagogical/theoretical practices encourage academic deconstruction (and so does academic funding for various ethnic programs) and detailed, explicit analysis of unique cultural identifiers. Yet, the producers of the primary texts (and in some cases, the secondary texts such as Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) undermine this tactic while acknowledging the differences within various Black cultures. Other authors reached across linguistic barriers in order to bring attention to understudied writers of the Caribbean to various metropoles. For example, Langston Hughes, who was multilingual, translated Black Hispanic writer Nicolas Guillen and Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, who wrote in Haitian French.
In addition, chapter 1 gives the reader examples of each type of this writing from European and white American philosophers. These writers, considered either philosophers or cultural critics in their day, helped justify enslavement philosophically using gender. Chapter 1 explains the choice of terminology used in this book. I chose to use “masculinity” rather than “manhood,” or “manliness.” Further, it was with hesitancy that I applied postcolonialism to African American texts. This strategy has not been without controversy within the academy. The term “postcolonial” implies that the populations studied have been colonized. Technically, African Americans were never colonized, but came to the Americas as chattel slaves involuntarily. Yet, through legal and extralegal means, even after enslavement, I am of the opinion that African Americans were kept in a state of coloniality that was as brutal as any metropolitan regime in the Caribbean or Africa. The Civil Rights Movement was an anticolonial struggle that inspired anticolonial movements throughout the African Diaspora. For example, the Caribbean had its own Black Power movement that was inspired by the African American Civil Rights Movement. Likewise, anticolonial artists in Zimbabwe reference African American authors like Langston Hughes.
Chapter 2, “Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa,” begins literary analysis. The chapter begins with a film analysis of Tarzan and the Apes as a popular, literary/film portrayal of the Black rapist beast. The bestial nature, according to Tarzan, begins in Africa. This image of African men was widely adapted and accepted by American audiences. The chapter moves from film analysis to literary analysis of Black men in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Wright’s Native Son speaks to the Black rapist beast mythology that was utilized by legal and extra-legal white male forces in order to brutalize and kill Black men in America. It is against this image of African males as beasts, which Wright writes—creating an oppositional, defiant Black male protagonist. Whereas African American writers contended with the Black rapist beasts, Black Caribbean men adapt and adopt the “creature Caliban” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Chapter 2 illuminates the ways that European men speak and write about Prospero versus Caliban. Aime Césaire retools Caliban in a Shakespearean adaptation for Black theater, A Tempest. Caliban, in oppositional defiance, speaks directly to the supposed superiority of Prospero. Caliban makes references to African gods, African languages, and African American Black Power symbolism. His cultural appropriations confirm my choice to deploy a Pan-Africanist reading strategy in this project. His mission to struggle for freedom transcends the mythical island includes the entire Caribbean archipelago and into North America and Africa. Yet, his mother, who was the initial owner of the island before the coming of Prospero, remains silent in the Black appropriation. The African text analyzed in the chapter, Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, is not a canonical text, but pivotal to this project. It features a protagonist who rejects configurations of masculinity handed to him by his own culture. The book ends optimistically in that the drunkard learns to carve his own definition of manhood.
An analysis of the Drinkard segues into the next chapter. Chapter 3, “Black Masculine Identities from Their Own Histories,” explores Black male protagonists who look to their own cultures for models of masculinity. It begins with the canonical text, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and the main character, Okonkwo. While feminists lambast the text for its uber-masculinity, I read the text here as a warning to men of the African descent who would internalize individualistic, reactionary definitions of masculinity from Euro-American men. A failure to acknowledge the contribution of women to their communities is a failure of humanity; therefore, the protagonists cannot live. George Lamming’s semi-autobiographical text, In the Castle of My Skin, portrays several horrific models of Black masculinity to the group of boys as they grow into maturity on the island. G, the narrator, presents Black men who have thoroughly internalized British, Victorian notions of Black masculinity that were more than likely forced upon them by British colonial systems. Lamming’s men are from all facets of socio-economic life: educators, laborers, beggars, government workers and officials, and village fathers. The book ends optimistically with the protagonist’s best friend returning from the United States to tell all of his boyhood friends that they must craft a new way of being in the face of worldwide white supremacist oppression. Last, Ellison’s Invisible Man is a rebuke of Wright’s Bigger Thomas. The desire for historical visibility in African American men silences, devalues, and makes invisible African American women. African American men who desire the visibility of white men ultimately perpetrate against women in their homes/communities/interpersonal relationships the same crimes that they detest and decry. While Ellison’s unnamed protagonist is not lynched by the American legal system as Bigger Thomas is, he most certainly commits a social suicide by dropping into a metaphorical womb until he can be born a new kind of Black man. In its book order, this chapter represents a physical reversal of the slave trade triangle. I do understand that this will draw ire of some of my colleagues, but I neither aim to essentialize nor minimize the experiences of African American blackness: it is one of myriad of experiences. Further, I attempt to decenter and defamiliarize the reader with