Reclaiming the Corporeal: The Black Male Body and the ‘Racial’ Mountain in Looking for Langston

Paragraph ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 201-212
Author(s):  
Chi-Yun Shin
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Male Body

Embodied and Disembodied Black Satire: From Chappelle and Crockett to Key & Peele

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Sketch Comedy

This chapter argues that Dave Chappelle, Affion Crocket, and the duo Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key have all fallen victim to the black comedic Conundrum of excessively physical comedy. These comedians testify not only to the problems associated with representations of the black male body, but also highlight the lack of strong female comediennes headlining television sketch comedy shows. This chapter also notes, however, that each of these comedians has produced satire that conveys substantive social commentary.

Men Walk in Parallel!

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
C. Kemal Nance
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Male Body ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Historical Representations

C. Kemal Nance reflects on the ways in which African American men utilize dance vocabularies in artistic and academic work. He reveals his findings through his own experiences as an African dance performer, as well as through a series of interviews with Baba Chuck Davis. Centering an analysis of gender and sexuality, Nance explores the scripted nature of these discourses while addressing the ideological implications of historical representations of the black male body, masculinity, and heteronormativity in the field of African dance in the United States.

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.

Here, Lies: AIDS and the Black Male Body

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-356
Author(s):  
Tamara Slankard
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Male Body

Through Archie Lindo’s Lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 143-163
Author(s):  
O’Neil Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Iconic Representations

The “creation” of Jamaican national identity owed much to the artistic movement that preceded and followed independence in 1962. While depictions of the peasantry, particularly male laborers, have become iconic representations of “true” Jamaicans, the scholarship surrounding these works has conspicuously ignored any erotic potential inherent in them. Using the contemporaneous, mostly private homoerotic photographic archive of Archie Lindo as a point of entry, this essay questions and complicates the narrative surrounding nationalist-era art in Jamaica, particularly the ways the black male body was mobilized in the development of Jamaican art and visual culture.

The Violent Weight of Whiteness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yancy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Site ◽  
White Hegemony

What is the lived experience of the black male body within the context of white America in the twenty-first century? How can we describe the deep existential and psychic dimensions of black male bodies as they negotiate their lives within the context of white hegemony? How do their bodies continue to be truncated according to a distorted and racist imago in the white imaginary? The black male body, within the context of this white imaginary, constitutes a site of “contamination.” As such, then, within the white body politic, black male bodies are thereby always already targets of the state, deemed “criminals,” “monsters,” and “thugs.” Textual testimony, coupled with social, political, and existential phenomenological analyses, demonstrates the sheer gravity of being black and male in a mythical postrace America.

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