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Masculinity and Mutability

When James Baldwin wrote of racism, he wrote of it as more than a violent repression of people. In Baldwin’s nonfiction essays, racism is a discursive practice that shapes the nonhumanity of the people suffering under its regime. It is a social control mechanism with economic results. It is a system of social proscription designed to extract goods and exploit services from populations with their own consent. The efficacy of racism is its persistent pervasiveness, begun in childhood, that causes it to feel natural. The “natural,” begun in childhood ensures that the adults who wield its power and wither beneath its cruelty never questions and never challenges its seemingly immutable, ahistorical existence. In the essay, “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin writes: “White Americans find it as difficult as white people anywhere else do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”^[1] Here, Baldwin links white Americans with other white populations. The point of continuity during Baldwin’s time is a “natural” assumption by Euro-Americans of cultural superiority based upon the absence of melanin, and the “natural” inferiority of Black people. An astute cultural critic, voracious reader, and prolific writer, Baldwin’s analysis of the fallacy of the “Negro problem” in America went beyond race and into gender.

For example, read Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” It is a call for European men to leave their home countries in order to explore other territories away from the familiarity of home. Dive into the strange, the exotic, the barbaric, and the truly bizarre, the poem says. It challenges European men to spread the Enlightenment and superiority of European culture to the teeming, ignorant brown peoples of the world. Read Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” again, particularly the last stanza. It is a challenge for European men to leave boyhood and enter manhood. Boyhood is for those who would rather remain in the mother country and pursue careers within the safe boundaries of Europe. Manhood, on the other hand, is for British men who would leave their homelands, explore and conquer other countries, and truly dominate people of color, uniting the world under the banner of the British flag. Manhood belongs to the colonialist. Yes, indeed, colonialism is a man’s venture, written in masculine terms.

When European men decided to leave their home countries and conquer other people in other places, at first their metropoles explicitly stated that their exploration was for new goods and markets. Then, the reasoning became something else: to spread the civilization and “advancements” of Europe to the backwards people of the world. This meant wielding and spreading a particular form of masculinity. In European historical, economic, and philosophical discourse, masculinity was the highest form of civility even in many Enlightenment tracts when the rights of the individual were celebrated, gender and racial biases remained. Furthermore, a burgeoning system, mercantile capitalism, demanded a suppression of the acknowledgment of the rights of some individuals. Capitalism, which undergirded colonial empires, was a machine that needed its human components/cogs in order for it to successfully function. Capitalism, a relatively new economic system at the time (before capitalism, the economic system of Europe was mostly driven by feudalism), was made possible by slavery and philosophy: the economic system dehumanized others while leading philosophers argued for its necessity in order to support the humanity and freedom of Europeans.

And exactly who would undergird the activities of the machine as Europe spread its Enlightenment? The empires of Europe found that there were millions of people of color across the globe. Who would be the cogs of this machine? Who were these nameless, faceless brown people who needed European Enlightenment? Who would be there to speak for those nameless, faceless, teeming nations in such dire need of European manhood/civility? Furthermore, who would help a ragged, new nation evolve from being a British colonial holding to an economic behemoth?

Baldwin, like Kipling, links white Americans to Europeans, but Baldwin writes after Kipling’s challenge to America. Baldwin was writing during a time when slavery had ended 100 years prior and African Americans existed in an almost colonial state within the borders of a free nation. He explicitly states that America equates Europe with civilization and that white civilization, in America and Europe, was the standard that all the nonwhite people of the world must mimic in order to be recognized by whites, who are in power, as “civilized,” though the gift of civilization came with an extreme degree of brutality in some cases and that civilization had not benefitted everyone in Europe, either. I agree with Baldwin when he writes, “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and pace him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.”^[2] Where did the notions of Euro-American white male superiority begin? What are these standards? And who set them? A quick glimpse of late Victorian-era literature, for example Charles Dicken’s shortest novel, Hard Times (an earlier view of British poverty and harsh life for the lower classes is also included in William Blake’s Songs of Experience), reveals that not all European men were living within these high standards of civilization. Many of the lower classes of Britain were living in squalor and poverty, and policies of emigrations were used to alleviate overcrowding and poor sanitation. With class differences deeply entrenched in many European nations, how did European civilization become the standard by which to judge others?

Chattel slavery and the Enlightenment irrupted onto the world stage roughly simultaneously and existed in seemingly perfect contradiction to one another. It was scientific racism, completely validated by philosophical tracts from the best Enlightenment minds, which justified and sanctioned the use of Africans as slaves. Africans were introduced to the New World as chattel slaves, and this workforce, in the very beginning, was overwhelmingly composed of African men. Placed outside of humanity by social reformers, clergy, and philosophers, and legally created as a nonhuman object to be possessed and punished accordingly, yet pivotal to the burgeoning capitalist system, the slave became more than just an object of commerce and production in Enlightenment discourse; the slave was an ultimate factor in Europe’s politico-economic campaign to establish itself as culturally superior to the rest of humanity. Cast in the shadows of the Enlightenment, the African slave who was without legal recourse or voice became the ultimate subaltern “Other.” And unlike any other slave force in history, this “Otherness” was based strictly upon the amount of melanin in the skin: the darker the skin, the closer to the animal kingdom, according to the “science” and philosophy of the time.

A closer study of the Enlightenment shows that philosophers’ writings about slavery add another dimension to its justification heretofore under-explored in academe and elsewhere. Enlightenment writings show well-defined European ideals of gender inequality that Europeans imposed on other cultures. According to Enlightenment philosophers, African men should be made to serve European men because they are not real men, and if they possess any sort of maleness, it certainly is not a masculinity which would render them human in the same way European men are human. Enlightenment and slavery, when viewed through the lens of masculinity, is not in opposition. They each rest upon this one premise: European masculinity (thereby, European civility) depended upon African men’s supposed femininity (and thereby, their barbarism). Theories surrounding African men simultaneously hypermasculinized Black women and effeminized African men; though Black men were in possession of penises, and later, animalistic, insatiable desires for white female flesh, they lacked the intelligence of truly “civilized” men. They were driven by violent, base desires for sex and the violence of war (not the strategy involved in victory) only. In much of the philosophical writings at this time, African men became some kind of faux men: subhumanoid beasts fit only to serve real men.

Alongside the rhetoric of freedom and universal humanism espoused by the Enlightenment philosophers existed several intercalated textual justifications, with the authority of “objective” science, for slavery. Shouts for democracy and liberty rang the loudest when the burgeoning mercantile capitalist system demanded the most chattel slavery. It was not uncommon to find that the same champions of freedom and liberty for Europeans held stock in African slave trading companies. While Bartolomè de las Casas argued the humanity of Indians, he used fictional examples that read like travel narrative exotica to highlight the “barbarity” in Africans in order to keep the plantation systems of the Caribbean and South America running smoothly; while Hegel’s writings argue for the freedom of individual, his “Thesis on Africa” explicitly states that sub-Saharan Africans made no contributions to the history of mankind and that the gender roles were “backwards” in relation to European gender roles; as historians work to include Jefferson among Enlightenment philosophers, they often gloss over his blatant racialized sexism when critiquing Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia; the French philosopher, Condorcet, while creating the documents which embody the Age of the Enlightenment and some of its most tolerant views on women, also rationalize slavery based upon his belief in the intellectual inferiority of Black men; while Carlyle did not champion the causes of oppressed Europeans in his writings and disagreed with the Enlightenment philosophers, he freely dehumanizes Black Africans in the Western Hemisphere in his pro-slavery tract, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” perpetuating Enlightenment racialized degendering.

When referring to the sexist brand of racism used to justify enslavement and exploitation of African men, I use a term borrowed from Abby Ferber, in her text White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (1998). In this text, Ferber posits that race and gender are linked and that white supremacy is a masculine undertaking. She writes that bodies are often “racialized and gendered.”^[3] Racialized, gendered bodies populate white supremacist discourse. On the one hand, in defining white men as the ultimate form of European civilization, the writers of these texts often erased the gender identities of African people. One glance at their caricatures shows African women who are masculine, in opposition to Northern European women, who are cast as the epitome of feminine beauty and charm. Photographs from the height of colonization of Africa/mining shows white men in the foreground fully-dressed flanked by partially dressed African men, many of them shorter than the European man. This signifies that only European men were real men and African men were somehow faux men at their service as they tame an ever-present, dangerous wilderness in the background. In white-authored texts, African men and bodies are part of the backdrop of the jungle. They are not allowed to speak, and if they are given utterance, it is monosyllabic and childlike. For example, the one line that an African speaks in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a canonical colonial text, is infantile: “Mr. Kurtz, he dead.”^[4] On the other hand, the calculated mis-presentation of African men and women in white supremacist discourse represents a complete erasure of gender. I label this performative act of white supremacist discourse, the act of erasing biological gender differentiation, and even sometimes subverting them with a complete lack of understanding/familiarity with complex African gender roles, racialized degendering.

Not only was it an insipid justification for the enslavement of African people, it is also a recurring theme in white supremacist discourse and contemporary racist American thought. For example, as recently as the Obama presidency, white supremacist and conservative commentators routinely commented on First Lady Michelle Obama’s “manly” physique. Sports commentators frequently question Serena Williams’s femaleness. Cartoonists over-emphasize her muscular physique, and on the cover of GQ magazine, the word “woman” was placed in quotation marks. I am not sure if this was an act of liberal thought, but Bruce Jenner, a white male Olympic athlete who recently transitioned to a woman named Caitlyn Jenner, was named “woman of the year.” One can see how Black women would be offended by GQ’s quoting of the word, “woman,” as if to question Williams’s gender.

I use the term Euro-American interchangeably with “white.” In the publication Nations & Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, editors Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjorgo use the term “Euro-American” instead of “white” to signify a global system of oppression by racist white males. Kaplan and Bjorgo recognized that racialized violence did not and does not stop at the edge of the United States.^[5] Writers of primary texts, such as Paule Marshall, comfortably link systems of oppression from one European country to America. Though African Americans are not considered “postcolonial,” many writers outside of the United States consider American policies of interference and imperialism, particularly those that aim to subdue African American political protest, as oppressive as those of other European countries. The writers involved in this study consider America’s history of racial segregation as destructive as South African Apartheid.

* * *

Though James Baldwin is taught and analyzed for his creative writings (when he is taught at all), I use his nonfiction as theory in this book. His clarity concerning the problems of European superiority and denial of Black masculinity are akin to other philosophers of the African Diaspora. In one of Baldwin’s most famous nonfiction pieces, The Fire Next Time, he explains to a nephew, his namesake, that things may be scripted onto his Black male body before he utters one word. Because of his Black male body, white Americans assume negative things about his intellectual capacity, harbor foreboding images about his sexuality in relation to white women, and nurture and enact iniquitous policies in order to squelch his desire for vertical economic advancement in a supposedly meritocratic society. In this collection of essays, the Black man is always-already constructed, configured as a subhuman in the white imagination, and that the Black man must “snatch his manhood”^[6] away from those white assumptions in order to reclaim some sort of human identity. Human identity can only come, Baldwin asserts, for Black men when they free themselves of the reactionary impulses to white oppression that begins in childhood.

Before Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), Frantz Fanon elaborated upon this always-already, ubiquitous nature of discourse in his seminal text Black Skin White Masks (1967). However, Fanon, like Baldwin, discusses prescriptive discursive strategies that originated from Euro-American thought as they relate to the Black male body specifically. As it pertains to the Black male body, discourse is both the creator and the instrument of oppression. I begin with Fanon’s assessment from his famous essay “The Fact of Blackness,” which posits that the Black man is predetermined. The Black man is made through hegemonic discourse using anecdotes, stories, tales, lies, stereotypes, and even laws. He summarizes: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”^[7] Like Baldwin, Fanon forecasts that the always-already, limiting identities prepared for Black men may be the destruction of the respective societies where they lived. He predicts, “It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history.”^[8] While Baldwin forewarns with a biblical reference to the Noah’s Ark story, Fanon reminds the reader that historically, oppressed people have violently rebelled against domination when civil solutions seemed dubious. After all, in the Gramscian sense, hegemony may be normative, but it is not totalizing: there is always some voice of dissent that irrupts to disrupt the status quo—sometimes violently. Historically, people rebel against a dominant, seemingly normal, narrative that misdefines, silences, and caricatures them. Men of African descent are no exception in that regard.

Ontologically speaking, within some Enlightenment/scientific racism writings, one form of existence became supreme, articulating an uneven binary that continues to shape and define gender relations in Western society. European standards of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, became “the dominant fiction,” as Kaja Silverman argues.^[9] Through colonialization and then enslavement, Europeans imposed their standards of masculinity as heteronormative and anxiously viewed all other masculinities as somehow deviant and in need of correction. It is this gendered view of race that justified slavery. It is the “authoritative” rhetoric of the writings of scientific racism that gave the fiction verity. It is this dominant fiction of European, heteronormative masculinity that allowed the same Enlightenment philosophers who wrote of freedom and individual liberty to hold stock in slave trading companies. As modes of production andtechnology changed, as power dynamics shifted, maintaining hegemonic masculinity, particularly since it was never concretely defined in the first place, produced near tangible anxiety in Euro-American males.

Once slavery ended, the United States experienced a rash of extralegal lynchings of Black men—sometimes accompanied by castrations—while crowds of white spectators watched approvingly. The lynchings, as proven by journalist and activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her landmark text, A Red Record (1895) simply could not be explained away by the fabrication of the Black male rapist beast that populated white American popular literature and later, film. As Wells-Barnett contends in her writing, slavery and the Civil War presented myriad opportunities for Black males to rape white women, yet there was not a rape epidemic in the South. There was something more sinister that served as an explanation for the racially motivated, extremely gender-specific violence (this is not to say that Black women were not lynched. They were. The overwhelming majority of victims, however, were male). Euro-American men once had a whole body of Other (ed) male bodies by which to negatively define themselves against, but with the dismantling of slavery and later, colonialism, that order of things, that negative identity was threatened with erasure.

The notion of a heteronormative masculinity that is negatively defined, one based upon what it is not rather than explicitly stating what it is or could be, has always been incongruent with reality. Real conditions produced and continue to produce a multiplicity of masculine identities. This explains why masculinity scholar Raewyn Connell uses the plural term, “masculinities,” in the landmark 1995 text, Masculinities. While some critics have lambasted Connell’s 1995 original articulation of multiple masculinities, it is still a very relevant theoretical paradigm in that it allows for an accounting of the subtle nuances of masculinity. Because of the multiple definitions created in oppressive conditions, there is never one totalizing definition of masculinity even among subordinate men. Like hegemonic masculinity, Black masculinity varies based upon geographical location, culture, and history; this is why I explore Black masculinity in a comparative framework here.

Like any study done in a comparative framework, a study of Black masculinity should not mean “monolithic” masculinity. Being a Black man in Nigeria or Senegal is inherently different from being a Black man in the Caribbean or the United States. The conditions against which each population of men asserted their “manhood” also varies from region to region. Black men in Africa experienced oppression in one way while Black men in the New World experienced it in others. Carol Boyce Davies writes, “[i]n Africa, colonialism, with its emphasis on assimilation and expropriation, asserted Euro-American culture to the African peoples it sought to conquer.”^[10] Leaders in Europe viewed Africa as a vast reserve of raw material for trade. During the Cold War, both the United States and the former Soviet Union engaged in a competition for arms and markets and targeted Africa for its seemingly limitless market potential. The United States interfered in the politics of various African nations in much the same way as it did in the Caribbean and Latin America. Again, the wishes of the people in those African nations were paternalistically disregarded by Western powers. It is against this backdrop of paternalism and colonialism, steeped in the “racisme” which Baldwin frequently references in his writings, that African men asserted their own masculine identities.

Chinua Achebe explains African writers’ occasion for speaking in his critical essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Achebe insists that Conrad portrays Africa as a land of silence and frenzy. In doing so, the text “projects the image of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”^[11] Alongside European ideals about what constitutes masculinity and ultimately, civility, African men are portrayed as utterly depraved, bestial, sexually licentious, and unable to defend themselves against outside forces; therefore, in spite of their fabled sexual potency, African men are portrayed in colonial, pro-slavery, and Enlightenment writings as effeminate and weak, deserving of colonization and European masculinizing/civilizing influence.

Nonetheless, African men retained their own ideas about masculinity through their own cultures. As stated by Johnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall in Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (2003), gender relations in West Africa were more complicated than what Europeans initially reported, and debates still rage about the extent of patriarchal dominance in those societies. Constructions of masculinity often survived more fully in literature, both oral and written, rather than reports from European travelers and anthropologists. In Africa, the oral epic significantly informs the construction of masculinity in society. The oral epics most certainly inform the literature. Some earlier texts, such as Forest of Thousand Daemons (1938) by D. O. Fagunwa and The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) (included in this text) by Amos Tutuola, mirror the oral epics that inform them. For the African texts included in this book, I use West African constructions of masculinity as informed by the orality of those cultures, since many slaves in the New World originated from the coast of West Africa. Many historians and literary critics believe that these traits did survive the Middle Passage and can be easily accessed in a text like the slave narrative of Venture Smith, an American slave who wrote his story via amanuensis during the late 1700s.

Historians and critics of the oral epics such as Thomas Hale acknowledge that “African oral epics appear as ‘masculine’ texts not only because their heroes are men, but also because these narratives have been told almost exclusively by men known regionally as griots.”^[12] From the Epic of Sundiata to the Epic of Askia Mohammed, griots weave stories of heroic deeds performed by men through acts of bravery during battle or other feats of superhuman strength. Other characteristics include an impeccable sense of justice, honor, and honesty, and the ability to rule over others benevolently without tyrannical impulses. A proper African hero, according to the griots, is implacable in demeanor, but not cruel to those he may rule. Poet and critic Tanure Ojaide defines this oral construction of masculinity as “a conglomerate of virtues and characteristics built around the traditional expectations of being a man and the glorification of virile values.”^[13] Like the oral texts, masculinity is an integral part of written texts produced by African authors. Literary critic Simon Gikandi writes that masculinity “lies at the center of the key texts of African literature, defining the natures of cultures, traditions, and experiences and signaling the complexity of contexts and texts.”^[14] Yet, masculinity is presented as part of a complex system of reciprocity between male and female in the works of many African writers; it is not the sole normalizing force.

This tendency toward questioning accepted standards of masculinity engaged Black male writers long before the twentieth century. In the New World, men of African descent experienced attempted cultural annihilation through enslavement. Yet, many African traits survived the Middle Passage and manifested themselves in the cultures of New World Africans. For example, the African root is prevalent in Caribbean nation language, African American cuisine, and the syncopated drum rhythms found throughout the Black Atlantic. Many slaves originate from warrior cultures, such as the Asante nation, and arrived with those ideals of gender roles and division of labor. Some of the very first slave narratives, like that of Venture Smith, portray a nuanced type of masculinity that is remarkably similar to those found in the West African oral epics. Oloudah Equiano, who experienced the Middle Passage, subsequent enslavement in the United States, extensive travel in the Caribbean, and a form of indentured servitude in Britain, crafted a masculine identity similar to Smith’s. Both Smith and Equiano shared the same masculine traits as their oral African predecessors: bravery in the face of adversity, fearlessness during battle, and honesty and frankness in business transactions. Smith and Equiano even implied that their African masculine identities were superior to that of their European counterparts. As aspiring entrepreneurs, they incorporated several instances in which Euro-American men were dishonest in business, and implied that dishonesty was a moral and masculine failure.

Historians agree that building a system of global-style capitalism by conquering and subduing foreign lands and peoples, and ultimately designing an international system of slavery using a brand of brutality the likes of which the world had never known prior, was largely a European, male undertaking. Regardless of the privilege and status African males may have enjoyed in their home lands, once captured and sold into slavery, their identities as masculine beings became subordinate to the Euro-American sense of masculinity. Sociologist Aldon Morris writes that “an important goal of slavery was to prevent the emergence of a sense of Black manhood. The slaveholders realized that the solidification of a robust Black masculinity could prove detrimental to the institution of slavery.”^[15] In order to prevent this, many slaveholding societies passed laws that severely restricted the rights and physical movement of Black men. For instance, some states within the United States forbade Black men from owning guns or hunting or fishing to supplement their families’ diets with wild game.

The Caribbean saw the worst of the global plantation system and colonialism with the almost total annihilation of the Arawak and Carib people, obliteration of an entire linguistic system, and the introduction of forced slave labor that supported a global mercantile capitalist system based upon the production of sugar and other raw goods such as leather that enriched landowners who may or may not have lived in the islands. For example, writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father became exceedingly wealthy from slave labor in Jamaica, but remained in England. One of the family’s fears was that they may be forced to the island during an economic downturn. Against the mostly Black male bodies in the Caribbean, European men developed a very complex system of patriarchy, and “this European male domination of the social relations within Caribbean society laid the foundation for the institutionalization of gender inequality in the region.”^[16] In addition to gender inequality, the slave labor system set up racial disparities, with Black bodies doing the manual labor of sowing seeds of global capitalism and European men reaping the benefits. This system of domination neither began nor ended with Anglophone plantation system. It was also characteristic of French, Spanish, and Dutch islands. Therefore, any study of Caribbean culture, regardless of the colonizing metropole, should begin with the plantation, according to Benitez-Rojo. I agree with Benitez-Rojo when he writes, “This is so because the Caribbean, in substantial measure, was shaped by Europe for the plantation, and the generalized historical convergences shown by the different territories in the region are always related to that purpose.”^[17]

Continued discrimination after slavery prompted in Black Caribbean men an “occasion for speaking,” according to Caribbean theorist and writer George Lamming. Throughout the Caribbean, Black men began to adopt and appropriate Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Black Caribbean male writers identify closely with Caliban, the slave in the play who performs most of the manual labor but who is objectified by Prospero, the invading European who takes the land and enslaves Caliban. In Telling Our Stories, literary critic Adetayo Alabi declares, “those most violently objectified by slavery insist, like Caliban, on their rightful status as speaking subjects.”^[18] As Alabi points out, in Caribbean appropriations of Caliban, his voice is not construed to support Prospero’s notion of imperialism. The figure of Caliban, since he represents those who are enslaved, also transcends island differences. After all, Black people, regardless of linguistic and cultural differences from island to island, are present in the region solely due to enslavement. Therefore, as Lamming and Alabi theorize, this makes Caliban suitable to speak for all subordinate Black men.

Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the early cleft of white American men from Europe allowed Euro-American males to define themselves independently of European ideals of masculinity. Instead, white masculinity was based upon success in the capitalist system rather than genealogy and feudalism. In fact, one key tenet of North American masculinity is feigned independence. These factors combined to form the “Self-Made Man” or the “Masculine Achiever” model. Though America has always been a multicultural country of immigrants, the Self-Made Man or Masculine Achiever Model is one built upon the exclusion of other non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant masculinities, and “in this way, white men sought to limit the extent to which they were forced to deal with competition from the diverse masculinities that were actually the norm in America.”^[19] From its formative stages, white American masculinity was plagued with the insecurities produced by the unstable nature of nascent capitalism, but an entire body of people was available to white men of the United States with which to contrast and allay their economic insecurities. Slave men, not women, were the antithesis to white masculinity. Black slave men were seen as a form of severely subjugated masculinity: weak and effeminate, trapped in a perpetual state of childishness and adolescence, and not intellectually equipped to be a masculine achiever in a free, democratic, capitalist society. Craig Wilkins, in the essay “Brothers/Others Gonna Paint the White House Black,” lists how white American males elevated their own image by crafting unflattering ones of Black males. Wilkins claims that white American males contrasted their own images with “the naturalized image of the brutal, base, highly sexualized, aggressive, animalistic, angry male is constantly broadcast through airwaves . . . to an all-too-receptive public.”^[20] Such stereotypical images created the object while they named it. Black men became rapist beasts in need of civilizing and/or violent eradication.

One of the most ontologically violent (and in the case of African American men, one of the most illegal) acts against the attempted normalization of oppression was the simple act of writing by a slave, then attaching the subtitle: “Written by him/herself.” Phyllis Wheatly, the mother of the Black belletristic tradition in the United States, performed an act of discursive violence by writing verse that showed astute awareness of herself as an enslaved African and in-depth political acumen in the United States and Great Britain. This writing of the slave, and subsequently, the colonized, took place all over the African Diaspora with a veritable explosion of creative production in the middle of the twentieth century as African countries and Caribbean island nations agitated and fought for their independence, and African Americans were embroiled in an international Civil Rights Movement. It is during this time period, which began slowly on the eve of World War II, that I begin this study.^[21]

On the surface, it seems the fact of blackness may be the only commonality of these disparaging cultures. These Black male writers traverse geographies, languages, and religions in order to create a dialectic concerning masculine identity. With their fiction, drama, and poetry they create and recreate identities for themselves. This project follows fiction and drama and the identities Black men create within those frameworks. They write then rewrite masculine identities through signification and critique. They warn of stereotypical, reactionary images in the literature, and some even create alternative visions of masculinity. Further, this book devotes a chapter to fiction and drama by Black women writers that question Black men’s internalization of Euro-American, heteronormative 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 comfortable readings of the texts included in this book. When canonical texts are read comparatively for theme, opportunities are created for new avenues of interpretation and pedagogy.

Chapter 4, “A Word on Black Feminists, Womanists, and Writers,” begins with a quote by Anna Julia Cooper. Contrary to traditional beliefs, feminism IS NOT foreign to Black women. Black women rejected different articulations of feminism by Euro-American women, because the objective seemed to be sharing individual power with Euro-American males rather than equality for all people. Black women simultaneously pioneered feminist strategies in their respective communities in order to combat inequality in whatever form it appeared. For example, author Una Marson of Jamaica fought tirelessly for equality for Rastafarian families and children. She instituted many of the social uplift programs that served Jamaican families for decades. Additionally, Black women rejected the idea put forth by Euro-American feminists that women should fight for total biological erasure of differences in order to receive equanimous treatment in their societies. Black women maintain that difference is not equitable to an uneven binary with women receiving the lesser. Differences can be acknowledged and respected while our practices remain free of discriminatory treatment. For this reason, Black feminist/womanist writers do not use the idea of gender complementarity in the derogatory way that such an idea is cast in Western society. Furthermore, women from Sojourner Truth to bell hooks have cautioned Black men against imitating the standards of manhood set by their patriarchal former masters. Sadly, anti-racist Black males are not always anti-sexist. And there have been instances when Black men who were unflinchingly devoted to the liberation of Black people equated “people” with “Black men.” According to Black womanist scholars, this type of thinking does not alleviate inequality in our respective communities, but only changes the color of the faces governing systems of exploitation.

Chapter 5, “Concerns of the Heart(h): Black Male Characters in Black Women’s Writings,” briefly leaves the creative works of Black male writers in order to privilege the writings of Black women who feature Black male protagonists. Far too often within academic circles, Black feminism has been/is being misread as nothing more than a long list of the wrongs committed by Black men. This is a simplified and dismissive reading of the aims and intent of Black feminist writers. Further, even in academia, it is commonly accepted and espoused that Black women’s struggle for equality, frequently within their own homes and communities, is in opposition to Black struggles for freedom from white oppression. For example, there are new articles published each year that claim Black women writers essentially ended the Black Arts Movement, as opposed to Black people’s lack of interest in nationalism as we were begrudgingly accepted into predominantly white institutions. When Black women writers privilege Black male protagonists, they do so as a plea for Black males not to internalize certain toxic features of hegemonic masculinity. Even BEFORE Connell’s articulation of various masculine identities, Black women writers and activists such as Sojourner Truth and Maria W. Stewart challenged Black men to establish and create masculine identities independent of the patriarchal institution and outside of the limits of the Puritanical manhood that informed New England’s masculine tradition. According to Black women writers, a struggle for equality which does not change a system of oppression, but only the color of the masculine faces who control that system, is ultimately a hierarchical struggle and nothing more. After struggles of hierarchy, repression is replicated intrapersonally, locally, regionally, and even nationally. Ba’s So Long a Letter, Marshall’s The Chosen Place the Timeless People, and Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, feature female characters who voice concern about struggles of hierarchy rather than true freedom and equality for all people—not just men. In addition, Black women writers routinely demonstrate that one does not have to possess a penis in order to wield phallic authority. There are patriarchal women who oppress other women across economic and racial lines, which prompted a historical denial of European feminism by Black women across the African Diaspora. Black women’s rejection of European feminism does not preclude Black women’s participation in feminist projects. Feminism for Black women was manifested differently: it involved empowering and improving conditions for families rather than sharing power with white men. For example, Una Marson’s feminism, as mentioned earlier, pioneered social working on the island during the early 1900s. Her projects included raising money for veterans, feeding underserved children and ending discrimination against Rastafarian families and children. Likewise, Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States reject European feminism, and created their own brand of feminism.

While the male protagonist of Ba’s So Long a Letter is dead by the time the protagonist writes her letter, she uses his death in order to demonstrate how easily struggles of freedom become struggles of hierarchy. Her husband, Modou, was once a staunch freedom fighter in Senegal who became a government employee. He abuses the tenets of Islam to abandon his wife inside the marriage, marry a friend of his daughter, secure more material goods, then dies. In addition, her friend is the victim of a “traditional” mother-in-law who uses that tradition to disrespect and exclude younger women from the ranks of respectable society. In this case, the elder woman, and not a man, possess phallic authority. Marshall’s choice of car for the male interest in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People symbolizes the global system of white oppression experienced by people of color. The car eventually kills its owner, because he has chosen to reject his culture’s model of masculinity for what he witnesses in the United States. In the same text, a Jewish sociologist comes to study the island. His white wife, a blue-blood New England woman, funds the project. As the descendant of a female, New England business baroness, it is the wife—and not the husband—who possesses the phallus. Marshall, like other Caribbean women writers such as Maryse Conde, bypasses the American South as the scene of slavery, continued economic exploitation, and the harshest expression of the phallic economy. Instead, she links New England, considered the region that embodies all that is right about America, to Caribbean slavery and economic exploitation. The wife’s ancestor lived in New England, but owned stock in the Caribbean slave trade. Finally, Hansberry’s Raisin contains a scene that garners little or no critical attention, but it is pivotal to understanding the men within the text. Ruth’s husband, Walter Lee, is tired of being called a “boy” by his white employers. His wife is a thirty-five-year-old mother who works as a maid and is called “gal” by her white, female employer. This demonstrates why Black women traditionally reject white feminism. White women were often patriarchal and condescending to the Black women they employed as domestics. Yet, Ruth’s dilemma is not seen as urgent as Walter Lee’s and it is deftly captured by Hansberry in one sentence. Hansberry, like Truth and Stewart and other Black women writers before her makes a demand of Black men: it is crucial that Black men evaluate the type of tyrannical, misogynist models of masculinity espoused by white capitalist cultures. Black people live within a race-based economy that denies Black couples the privilege of acting out “traditional” gender roles as modeled by white society, it seems irrational for Black men to internalize those roles and try to enforce them within the home. This only ever leads to disharmony in the home and sometimes personal destruction in the texts.

Chapter 6, “Out of Necessity: Black Men Evaluate Definitions of Masculinity,” returns the reader to creative literature written by Black men. This chapter presents men who are not only different geographically, but who practice three different religions. Ousmane’s character in God’s Bits of Wood is Islamic. Alexis, hilarious in General Sun, My Brother, practices Haitian voodoo even in the face of annihilation. The father of Gaines’s In My Father’s House is a Christian preacher. Each character faces a crisis which forces him to look at “traditional” definitions of masculinity that they have internalized from their religious teachings/societies and practiced all of their lives. Ousmane’s characters face an economic crisis while Alexis’s character is faced with a flood and a stigmatized disease. The father in Gaines’s narrative fathered children that he treated as trophies of his sexual conquest. The oldest son commits suicide in order to show his father the damage that gender inequality does to Black families. Each of these texts asks a central question: Are personal practices of masculinity by Black men to blame for the dysfunction of Black families and communities? It is a disconcerting concept. And while Gaines and Ousmane are rather well-known in the literary world, these texts are not taught as frequently as others produced by those authors.

The conclusion of this text returns us to Baldwin’s challenge to Black males. The social, economic, and natural disasters that plagued the characters in the previous chapters continue to plague those same areas, ironically. And while this book has been a joy to write, it has been difficult to end. The struggle for gender identity and equality within respective African communities continues.