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 Black (anti)fandom's intersectional politicization of "The Walking Dead" as a transmedia franchise

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Black Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Walking Dead

Despite axiomatic industry and academic discourses of The Walking Dead's (2010–) status as quality TV—linked to its graphic visuals and compelling story lines—strong counterclaims question the text's (mis)representations of race and its propensity for systematically killing off Black male characters. An analysis of African Americans' responses to marginalized Black male characters politicizes the racial milieu of the series against the backdrop of wider racial relationships in the United States. Moreover, The Walking Dead is a successful transmedia franchise, and thus racial discourse shifts and changes, depending on which transmedia texts are being consumed. Thus, Black antifan rhetoric aimed at the spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead (2015–) centers on the zombification of Black men, a metaphor of the mistreatment and othering of young Black men by US police. Comparatively, The Walking Dead video game (TellTale Games, 2012) offers character development for its Black male lead character that fans praise against wider cultural representations in relation to both the franchise's hyperdiegesis and to video games in general. Therefore, Black audiences may read The Walking Dead as both racially reductive and radical. In doing so, aspects of self-identity, such as race, can inform (anti)fan positions through intersectional politics.

scholarly journals Black Masculinity and Plantation Patriarchy in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Lobodziec
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Margaret Walker

In <em>Jubilee</em>, Margaret Walker depicts plantation patriarchy as a racial and gendered context that coerces black men to redefine their masculine conceptualizations. The fictitious slave plantation represents the system which commodifies and divides black people “into those with skills […], field hands, ‘breeding females,’ concubines, and children” (Nichols 1972, p. 10). This portrayal of slave plantation is congruent with historically documented circumstances, when “Much of [the slave] labor was gender- or age- specific” (Ash 2010, p. 20). As far as the position of black men is concerned, ascribed a subordinate status to that of white masters, overseers, and servants, both free and enslaved black men begin to imbibe patriarchal mindset and redefine their own masculine prowess. As Margaret Walker portrays, this response to oppressive plantation patriarchy effects multifarious black male postures, ranging from resisting and self-asserting warriors to humiliated and silenced victims.

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.

scholarly journals Bridging Black Male and Female Standpoints through Autoethnographic Cultural Symbiosis in Gloria Naylor’s The Men of Brewster Place

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adishree Vats
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Females ◽  
Male Characters

The present paper argues that Gloria Naylor in The Men of Brewster Place (1998) spectacularly recreates, from a black female’s viewpoint, a solemn literary leeway for African American men’s narratives, and recommends an obligatory shufti to their hidden lives as to how the apparatuses of dominion objectify, suppress and marginalize African American men as well. These men have also been victimized, marginalized and objectified on the basis of their race, class and sexuality by the stereotypical mainstream power structure just like their female counterparts. Furthermore, the paper endeavours to scrutinize how it is unworkable to accomplish a genuine Black Feminist Standpoint without essentially appreciating Black Men’s Standpoint. Black men, who although are suppressors when it comes to their relationship with black females, simultaneously are also being suppressed beneath the tutelage of the mainstream hegemonistic-cum-stereotypical power system. As a sequel to Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (Naylor, 1983), The Men of Brewster Place attempts to autoethnographically lend some voice to her male characters, who complemented her female characters in the first novel.

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.

“I See Death Around the Corner”: Black Manhood and Vulnerability in Me Against the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (7) ◽  
pp. 632-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keven James Rudrow
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Suicide Ideation ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Manhood ◽  
The World ◽  
Relational Network

This essay uses Tupac Shakur’s Me Against the World as a case study examining how Black male artists use hip-hop music for articulating the racialized vulnerability organizing their manhood. By thinking about how Shakur understands his Black maleness through his social relationality to the world around him, Shakur’s album creates resistive space for defining Black maleness despite how Black masculinity is often defined and imposed on Black men. Shakur’s album maps a relational network for understanding a brand of Black manhood obscured by dominant discourses about Black men and their masculinity. Specifically, Shakur’s album frames Black maleness through poverty and how it orients Black men, his perpetual susceptibility to harm and death, and suicide ideation as a response to his despair. Connecting Black maleness and vulnerability, Shakur’s album offers insight about being Black and male in a patriarchal White supremacist society.

scholarly journals Black Masculinity and Plantation Patriarchy in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Lobodziec
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Margaret Walker

In <em>Jubilee</em>, Margaret Walker depicts plantation patriarchy as a racial and gendered context that coerces black men to redefine their masculine conceptualizations. The fictitious slave plantation represents the system which commodifies and divides black people “into those with skills […], field hands, ‘breeding females,’ concubines, and children” (Nichols 1972, p. 10). This portrayal of slave plantation is congruent with historically documented circumstances, when “Much of [the slave] labor was gender- or age- specific” (Ash 2010, p. 20). As far as the position of black men is concerned, ascribed a subordinate status to that of white masters, overseers, and servants, both free and enslaved black men begin to imbibe patriarchal mindset and redefine their own masculine prowess. As Margaret Walker portrays, this response to oppressive plantation patriarchy effects multifarious black male postures, ranging from resisting and self-asserting warriors to humiliated and silenced victims.

“An Air of Expectancy”

2012 ◽  
Vol 642 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saida Grundy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Historically Black ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Male College ◽  
And Gender

This qualitative study explores formations of masculinity among students at a historically black all-male college, offering insights into how the institution crafts the manhood of its students in accordance with gender and class ideologies about black male respectability, heteronormativity, and male hegemony. While a plethora of studies on poverty, deviance, and marginalization have highlighted black men “in crisis,” this article examines middle-class black men and explores sites of conflict and difference for this latter group. Three critical insights into middle-class black masculinity are revealed by this approach: first, that men are institutionally “branded” through class and gender ideologies; second, that the exceptionality of high-achieving black men is politicized to endorse class conflict with other black men; and finally, that sexuality and class performances are inseparably linked through men’s sexual consumption of black women.

Mummified Fragments: Characters and Themes in Hariharan’s Novel The Ghosts of Vasu Master

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 827-835
Author(s):  
R. Ramakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
School Teacher ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Male Characters

Hariharan’s versatility as an author with a mission to subvert the entire tradition can be recognized in every work of fiction she has created. For this purpose in her second novel, The Ghosts of Vasu Master she experiments with a male protagonist and a host of other male characters. Vasu is the protagonist of the novel. He is a retired school teacher from P.G. Boys’ school, Ellipettai. He leads a lonely widower’s life with two of his sons employed and settled away from home. This article scrutinizes the life of an idower is all aspects.

DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN DASHNER’S MAZE RUNNER NOVEL AND FILM ADAPTATION

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Anggia Putria ◽  
Muizzu Nurhadi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The research aims to reveal how the application of dramatic elements of Dashner’s Maze Runner is transformed into its film adaptation. To achieve the purpose, the researcher analyzes seven dramatic elements by Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid which consist of exposition, inciting moment, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research are the differences of the dramatic elements in the novel and film adaptation are not significant because only the scenes of exposition and rising action are not similar.

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