Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood? Meditations on African-American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social Menace
An Introduction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3831321 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Brown (0000-0001-9812-0067), Stephanie J Brown (0000-0001-6639-1890), Keith Clark (0009-0008-1046-1368) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 732-737 |
| Publication date | 2003-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Callaloo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/cal.2003.0078 |
| OpenAlex | W2093083804 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 1 |
Given its preeminence in American and African-American literary history, one might think of Ellison's magnum opus as the "Bible" of contemporary African-American writing, functioning as the genesis of postmodern black writing much as Hemingway apotheosized Huckleberry Finn as the grounding narrative for the modern American novel. 1 Certainly, the novel's opening five words, their syntactically discrepant assertion of agency and absence, capture the dominant cultural episteme with respect to the bases of black ontology: the paradox of both being and (not) being black. The first-person subject pronoun "I," whose referent is "invisible," reifies absence; the oxymoronic and incongruous "invisible man" hearkens back to Frederick Douglass' similarly self assertive and self-erasive characterization of himself as an [End Page 732] "American Slave" in the title of the great patri-narrative of African-American men's literary genealogy. As the Invisible Man's fictive descendant, Gaines's Grant Wiggins, the schoolteacher protagonist in his 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying, declares a corresponding absent presence during the murder trial of a semi-literate young black male whom the state will subsequently execute for a crime he did not commit. Grant's chimerical sense of self is occasioned by the trial itself: his utterance bespeaks a cultural narrative that collapses distinctions between education and ignorance, freedom and imprisonment, guilt and innocence. These fictive testaments to black male social and corporeal annihilation make Ishmael Reed's effusively over-the-top declaration that "[b]eing a black man in America is like being a spectator at your own lynching" (16) more than mere rhetorical jujitsu. African-American literature about men has chronicled blackness in the white American imaginary, where metaphorical and occasional physical "lynchings"—notwithstanding Clarence Thomas's self-serving invocation of the term—are part and parcel of black men's social, discursive, and physical reality
Appropriation · Art · Innocence · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2014 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |