Masculinity and Mourning in Modern African American Criticism

Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity. By Nathan Grant. Columbia: UP of Missouri, 2004. xiv + 239 pp. $44.95.

Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. By Anissa Janine Wardi. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. xiv + 214 pp. $55.00.

Nathan Grant's book, Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing, and Modernity, has a provocative title. Several critical texts in recent years have significantly added to the body of scholarship on black masculinity, and the title of this book seems to indicate that it will augment this scholarship by taking it in directions that are fresh and new. The writers that Grant includes in his study, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, are all canonical ones whom he could use to develop a very powerful argument.

As the title of the book announces, two of its major concepts are "masculinist impulse" and "modernity," and given the title of the Introduction, "Modernism and the Masculinist Impulse," one would think that it would define these concepts in the context of the book's analysis and provide its central critical focus. However, the Introduction does not clearly define masculinist impulse, modernity/modernism, or postmodern, and the failure to define masculinist impulse—the book's primary topic—is the major problem in the book. Modernism is a word which Grant uses interchangeably with modernity, and it is not clear specifically what either one means in his analysis. It also becomes apparent in the Introduction that postmodern is a key concept, one that needs definition because of its specific relationship to modernity/modernism in the study, but neither the term nor the whole conceptual nexus is defined or explained.

Because of the lack of clarity in the Introduction, the point that Grant is trying to make about black men is not clear at the beginning of his second chapter, which is entitled "Toomer's Male Prison and the Spectatorial Artist." Obviously he is saying that black men are the spoilers of black women in Cane, as other critics have made clear for years, but the main idea about masculinist impulses in Part One of Cane is never clear. Later, Grant discusses the "modern machine" in Cane, which apparently is an aspect of modernity that has a very negative impact on black masculinity, but the connection between modernity and black masculinity is lost in the directionless critique. Another concept that is never defined is "spectatorial artist." Toomer is the spectatorial artist, and the concept connects him to his own male characters who are negatively portrayed. While this is clear, much else is not. Another major flaw here and throughout the book is incoherent paragraphs that are at least two pages long.

These problems should not obscure the fact that the book's readings improve as it progresses, and Grant's analysis often sparkles with brightness and perception—for example, in the second chapter about Toomer's Cane, "Of Silent Strivings: Cane's Mute and Dreaming 'Dictie,'" which provides insight into the subjects of modernity, labor, and black maleness in Cane. The readings of the individual tales in Cane provide flashes of significant insight. Two chapters about Hurston, "Hurston's Masculinist Critique of the South" and "Romance of the Supernature," follow this same pattern of bright, perceptive reading that is not connected to a clear overall conceptual pattern. The same is true of chapters treating Wideman, Morrison, and Naylor.

Overall, a reader becomes increasingly aware of the book's potential as the chapters unfold. However, by the end the main idea of the book is still vague because there is no guiding conceptual pattern. The fine readings of individual parts of texts are obfuscated by the book's incoherent structure.

Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature by Anissa Janine Wardi is another work that focuses on a very engaging and promising subject in...