INCARCERATION, TRANSFORMATION AND AWARENESS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Mariam Youssef
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novel ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Ernest Gaines ◽  
Male Incarceration

 This article examines the theme of black male incarceration in the African American novel. Black male incarcerated characters are frequently presented as the most socially aware characters in the novel, in spite of their isolation. In different African American novels, black male incarcerated characters experience a transformation as a result of their incarceration that leads to a heightened awareness of their marginalisation as black men. Because of their compromised agency in incarceration, these characters are not able to express black masculinity in traditional ways. Using novels by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John A. Williams and Ernest Gaines, I argue that black male incarcerated characters use their heightened awareness as an alternative method of expressing black masculinity.

The 7th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Katelyn Knox
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Young Black Male ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Musical Elements

Popular music abounds in Afropean literature, yet to date scholars have primarily read novels’ musical elements through author biography. In this article, I focus narrowly on the rich musical peritexts and musico-literary intermediality of two novels by Insa Sané: Du plomb dans le crâne (2008) and Daddy est mort…: Retour à Sarcelles (2010). In addition to the abundant diegetic musical references, both novels also feature two structural musical layers. I argue that these three musical elements constitute critical sites through which the novels’ narratives, which center around young, black, male protagonists who seek to escape vicious circles of violence through recognition, emerge. Ultimately, these novels’ musical elements situate the narratives’ discussions of black masculinity within much broader conversations transpiring between French and African American communities, thereby providing a much larger cultural genealogy to supplement the characters’ fraught literal ones.

scholarly journals Nobody Knows My Name: The Masquerade of Mourning in the Early 1980s Artistic Productions of Michael Jackson and Prince

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 628-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Pochmara ◽  
Justyna Wierzchowska
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Flexible Approach ◽  
Cultural Displacement

AbstractThe article analyses Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and Prince’s movie Purple Rain. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. Jackson’s and Prince’s performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father. Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson’s and Prince’s performances.

scholarly journals Romancing Beale Street

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-190
Author(s):  
Robert J. Corber
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Television Show ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Visual Style

The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.

scholarly journals Gender Trouble and the Tragic Black Woman Hybrids in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 08
Author(s):  
Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novels ◽  
True Representation ◽  
Gender Pattern ◽  
Gender Trouble

<p>The African-American female character's description in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing are very impressive, among whom Clotel, Clare and Irene are depicted as one of the most important “passing” figures for the whole story. Though sharing some similarities with the traditional Black women in the past African-American novels, Clotel, Clare and Irene are very different. The strong connection with as well as variations than the usual gender pattern are mixed within these women. It is only by this new approach that the reader can re-think Black woman and build a new African-American female identity. Taking into the consideration an ecofeminist point of view, this paper is going to study the points of similarities with and differences from the traditional Black Women in the novel, unwrap on the developing subject identity of Black women in this novel, in order to prove that in this novel female subject identity is more than a true representation of essentialism and dualism, in a special and unique realistic perspective.</p>

scholarly journals Representations of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s Silent Film Within Our Gates

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-37
Author(s):  
Fatma Chenini
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Oscar Micheaux ◽  
Do So

AbstractMy paper focuses on studying the representations of black masculinity in the Harlem Renaissance’s discourse, and investigates how these representations challenged the limited, reductive and one-dimensional stereotypes which were adopted and further disseminated by the popular culture of the time. To do so, I will analyze a number of black male characters depicted in the silent film, Within Our Gates (1920), of the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

scholarly journals Becoming God: Cycles of Rebirth and Resurrection in Their Eyes Were Watching God

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Kaitlynn N Milvert
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
External Control ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
American Novels ◽  
The Individual ◽  
External Forces

This paper reexamines African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s presentation of the self in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), generally considered one of the most important African-American novels of the twentieth century. Originally criticized by Hurston’s contemporaries as a retrograde folk portrait of African-American life, Their Eyes presents the oral narrative of Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, a woman surrounded by natural and social cycles. Building on the novel’s allusive title and the convergent Biblical and folkloric frameworks of the work, I trace the evolving concept of “God” throughout the novel as external forces continually shape and reshape Janie’s world for her, questioning whether she can retain any individual agency navigating through these cyclical, predetermined pathways. The redefined vision of the individual that emerges from this reading counters the criticism of Hurston’s contemporaries, as Janie herself assumes the role of “God” at the novel’s conclusion and gains the power to create her own cycles, free from external control. I thus argue that the novel transcends its supposed function as a depiction of the African-American self to make a broader, humanistic claim for the power of the individual, not contingent on social distinctions. 

scholarly journals Seeing constructed realities: images and law in the contemporary American novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Drew Amidei
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Political Criticism

In the new digital era, novelists have developed new tools to aid them levy political criticism against targets that have traditionally 12en outside the reach of the novel. By examining four contemporary American novels, I seek to examine how novelists use embedded photography to levy political criticism against systems and entities that rely on verbal language. My chief argument is that the ambiguity of language, when compounded with the ambiguity of photographs, forces readers into a mode of active interpretation which allows them to question concepts they usually take for granted. The hope is that by better understanding how these authors convey their messages we can better understand not just the systems they criticize, but build a model for future activist writing and criticism.

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