Global Masculinities and Manhood

1. Negotiating Jamaican Masculinities

1 negotiating Jamaican Masculinities MAURICE HALL o ld pirates yes they rob i, sold i to the merchant ships, Minutes after they took i, from the bottomless pit. Redemption Song, r obert nestor Marley Jamaican masculinity is a social construction that has everything to do with the ways in which slavery, colonialism, and now globalization have produced identity performances that are multiple and conflicted. There are several current analyses that examine the history of the construction of masculinity in the Caribbean generally and Jamaica specifically (see, for example, Lewis, 2003; Forbes, 2005;Lindsay, 2002; Reddock, 2004). These works approach analysis from interdisciplinary perspectives including history, literary studies, and sociology. The concept of Caribbean masculinity is a subject of significant debate between and among these scholars. In influential scholarly volumes by authors such as Lewis (2003) and Reddock (2004), the debate focuses on whether males in the Caribbean generally, and Jamaica specifically, have been marginalized, with boys left to fend for themselves, or whether it is in fact the privileging of males, rather than their marginalization, that has led to an erosion of male status and authority in Caribbean societies. It is not my intent to reproduce those analyses here; rather, this chapter will focus on Jamaican masculinity using concepts drawn from the perspectives of performativity and postcoloniality. I will argue that there are three major performance stances that have come to characterize Jamaican performances of masculinity: rude boys, Rastas, and mimics, performances that can largely be understood in the context of Jamaica’s postcolonial history. I will use two well-known icons from Jamaica’s history and culture, men who are seen as leaders in their respective fields of endeavor, and I will argue that they are models for understanding the extent to which Jamaican masculinity has challenged Western notions of ideal manhood and reinvented and legitimized Africanized conceptions of manhood. There are two important caveats in terms of how this discussion will unfold. First,Iwillembedthediscussionandanalysisofmasculinityinbroaderdiscussions of culture, recognizing that gender and culture are largely intersecting discourses (Lewis, 2003). The mutual influence of these two discourses is at the heart of my thesis. Second, while there will be brief discussions of gender relations and issues pertaining to the status of women, this essay will focus on the construction of masculine identity. This is a choice made for reasons of space rather than a reflection or suggestion of a hierarchy of importance. The concept of performance highlights the extent to which identity negotiation is a social construction. While performance scholars view a wide variety of rituals, media presentations, and literary/theatrical aesthetic creations as fitting under the rubric of performativity (Schechner, 2002), it is the concept of embodied performance as outlined by Conquergood (1991) that equates the body as a site of knowing. Judith Butler (1990) extended the concept of performativity to make the argument that gender is largely the product of repeated performances that, influenced by powerful social sanctions , produce an illusion of fixed identities linked to biological sex. From this perspective, masculinity, then, is an “acting out” of maleness, exteriorizing gendered behaviors through combinations of gestures, aggression, and gait (Lewis, 2004). The performances of the black male body in developing, previously colonized countries such as Jamaica have occurred in the context of European discourses that privilege the aesthetic and performance of the white, European, English body. Throughout the duration and aftermath of Jamaica’s colonial history, there was a systematic effort to privilege white, British cultural identity discourses as normative and to marginalize cultural identity discourses of “Africanness” as inferior and unsophisticated. Jamaican sociologist Don Robotham (1998) argues: “White and Anglo-American/ European identities have established self-definitions more deeply driven by the historical experience of plantation slavery and the slave trade. These experiences have shaped the definition of whiteness and white hegemonies in deep contrast and contradiction to blackness and black subordination, as an entire hegemonic complex and structure” (p. 307). One can conceptualize black subordination as the end product of enforced bodily performances that privileged white over black ways of being and be32 . MAURICE HALL having. The enslaved, black male body became a metonym for the savagery of Western European, specifically British, colonialism in the Caribbean. There has been a continuing struggle of the black male body to assert its own aesthetic and its own performance space in the context of dominant discourses that still regard it as periphery, strange, degraded, and marginal. The black...