"Sublime Patriots": Black Masculinity in Three African-American Novels

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Robert Nowatzki
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
American Novels

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.

Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Us South ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Us

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

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.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 282-290
Author(s):  
Libra R. Hilde
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Family ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
African American Family ◽  
American Family ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Dominant Narratives

As Americans grapple with the most recent spate of deaths of African American men and women at the hands of the police, we are once again confronting damaging stereotypes about the Black family and Black masculinity rooted in the legacy of slavery. This book explores the masculine hierarchy of slavery that continues to influence current attitudes and shape public policy. Even as the world has changed, attitudes about human hierarchies have remained deeply entrenched. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved and free men undertook to be fathers, this book offers a counterpoint to the dominant narratives about the pathology of the African American family and absent Black fathers.

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.

Savior of the Race: The Messianic Burdens of Black Masculinity

Exchange ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald B. Neal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
African American Communities

Abstract This paper is concerned with the messianic construction of manhood within African American communities in North America and its normative imprint in shaping and measuring masculinity among African Americans. In this essay, messianic manhood is treated as a utopian construction of masculinity that is found in liberal and conservative constructions of Protestant Christianity. In examining this tradition of manhood, representative messianic men are interrogated who have participated in and have been shaped by this tradition. Overall, messianic manhood is inconceivable apart from an oral tradition of preaching and singing where the person of Jesus is understood as Lord, savior, and ally of the oppressed.

scholarly journals Imagining a Mestiza-Self Through the Double-Consciousness Trope

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 2510-2518
Author(s):  
Regina Sanders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Internalized Racism ◽  
Mixed Race Identity ◽  
Black And White ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Race Identity

This paper is a comparative study between two African-American novels: Caucasia by Danzy Senna (1998) and Quicksand by Lenna Larsen(1928). It specifically discusses how their respective mixed-race protagonist re-appropriates the double-consciousness trope –a term originally coined by African-American scholar W. E. Du Bois to describe the existence of blacks in the United States. More specifically, I argue that Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia transcends traditional notions of mixed-race identity found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. First, I establish that Helga, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand is constructed to play the version of the double-consciousness which assumes that mixed people (black and white) in United States live with internalized racism. Next, I demonstrate that Caucasia challenges Quicksand by providing us with a mulatta protagonist who re-appropriates the notions of double-consciousness by making it instrumental to her own survival and birth-right to be mixed.

scholarly journals Female genital mutilation in African and African American women's literature

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Darja Marinšek
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Female Genital Mutilation ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Female Genital

The article builds on the existing dispute between African and African American women writers on the competence of writing about female genital mutilation (FGM), and tries to determine the existence and nature of the differences between the writings of these two groups. The author uses comparative analysis of two popular African and African American novels, comparing their ways of describing FGM, its causes and consequences, the level ob objectivity and the style of the narrations.This is followed by a discussion on the reasons for such differences, incorporating a larger circle of both African and African American women authors, at the same time analysing the deviance within the two groups. While the differences between African American writers are not that great, as they mostly fail to present the issue from different points of view, which is often the result of their lack of direct knowledge of the topic, African authors' writing is in itself discovered to be ambivalent and not at all invariable. The reasons for such ambivalence are then discussed in greater context, focusing on the effect of the authors' personal contact with circumcision as well as their knowledge and acceptance of Western values. The author concludes by establishing the African ambivalent attitude towards FGM, which includes different aspects of the issue, as the most significant difference between their and African American writers' description of this practice.

scholarly journals Chinatown Black Tigers: Black Masculinity and Chinese Heroism in Frank Chin's Gunga Din Highway

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-86
Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Frank Chin ◽  
Asian American Men ◽  
Traditional Masculinity

Images of ominous villains and asexual heroes in literature and mainstream American culture tend to relegate Asian American men to limited expressions of masculinity. These emasculating images deny Asian American men elements of traditional masculinity, including agency and strength. Many recognize the efforts of Frank Chin, a Chinese American novelist, to confront, expose, and revise such images by relying on a tradition of Chinese heroism. In Gunga Din Highway (1994), however, Chin creates an Asian American masculinity based on elements of both the Chinese heroic tradition and a distinct brand of African American masculinity manifested in the work of Ishmael Reed, an African American novelist and essayist known for his outspoken style. Rather than transforming traditional masculinity to include Asian American manhood, Chin's images of men represent an appropriation of elements from two ethnic sources that Chin uses to underscore those of Asian Americans. While deconstructing the reductive images advocated by the dominant culture, Chin critiques the very black masculinity he adopts. Ultimately he fails to envision modes of masculinity not based on dominance, yet Chin's approach also can be read as the ultimate expression of Asian American individualism.

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