Competing Masculinities (III)

Black Masculinity and the White Man’s Black Man

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23760366
AutoresLynne Segal (Universidad de Londres, autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Páginas140-170
Fecha de publicación2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaSlow Motion (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230582521_7
OpenAlexW2494633050
ISBN9780230582521
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas11

‘Ugly’, indeed, unbelievably ugly, were all the fruits of white men’s four centuries of contact with Africa. Marlow’s depiction of the people of Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was, in many ways, more sophisticated than that of his contemporaries and predecessors. He thought he could detect a kinship with the ‘black beast’ of Africa created by the European imagination; others could not. One way of delving deeper into the fractured features of modern masculinity in the West is to explore the social construction of another subordinated masculinity — Black masculinity. What we will find is more evidence of the conflict and chaos at the heart of the dominant ideal of masculinity: heterosexual, white and — to the Victorian mind — English. The first ‘fact’ about the ‘black man’ which the white man knew was that he was not really a man at all — a child rather than an adult, a body not a mind. White men created the image of Black men as yet another contrast necessary for their own self-image. ‘Travellers with closed minds’, African writer and literary scholar Chinua Achebe comments on white men’s and women’s reportage of Africa, ‘can tell us little except about themselves.’ 3 What they reveal of themselves, however, is well worth pondering. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Art · Depiction · Ideal (ethics) · Literature · Masculinity · Political science · Race (biology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture