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  • In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances
  • Lisa Hinrichsen
Andrew B. Leiter. In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. 283 pp. $39.95.

Andrew B. Leiter’s suggestive study traces the lingering literary shadow of the “black beast,” or the fantasy of the sexually aggressive African American male, from its origins in slavery to its culmination in Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son. In addition to underscoring the role of the stereotype in the legal establishment of segregation, the political reinforcement of white solidarity, and the social entrenchment of black disenfranchisement, Leiter also explores how this corrosive image crystallizes individual and collective anxieties about sex, power, and community. As he parses the development of the “black beast” myth in American letters, he ties its rise to related psychological and social phenomenon: the cult of virginal white womanhood, the sexual victimization of black women, the spread of spectacle lynching, and key historical crises such as the Atlanta riot of 1906 and the Scottsboro trials (1931-1937). Leiter thus identifies concerns about interracial sex in the rise of the Harlem and Southern Renaissances from the fraught ground of Southern race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. [End Page 535]

Drawing on work such as Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (1993), Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America (1995), Robyn Wiegman’s American Anatomies (1995), and Werner Sollors’s Neither Black nor White yet Both (1997), Leiter emphasizes how the intertextual study of literature across racial and geographic space is crucial to making accurate claims about how sexual and racial anxieties impact both literary tradition and the culture at large. In exploring the Southern roots of the Harlem Renaissance and describing how the Renaissance engaged white Southern authors, Leiter intriguingly pairs texts with chronological and thematic similarities, constructing a chronology of the development of the “black beast” stereotype at the heart of American racial anxiety. James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is read with Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint; George Schuyler’s Black No More with William Faulkner’s Light in August; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind with Allen Tate’s The Fathers; and Erskine Caldwell’s Trouble in July with Richard Wright’s Native Son. He places these texts in relation to three representational paradigms key to the period: racist propaganda (Thomas Dixon); the social protest tradition (Ida B. Wells); and psychological and pseudo-psychological theories (W. J. Cash).

In his first chapter, Leiter argues that to read the image of the “black beast” is to engage the history of plantation slavery; he thus carefully situates the development of the “threat” of the hypersexual black male within the sociohistorical context of the nineteenth century. In his subsequent chapters, Leiter teases out the stereotype’s connections to white national identity (in Black No More), white communal identity (in Light in August), white femininity (in Gone with the Wind), and white masculinity (in The Fathers), while simultaneously unfolding an argumentative arc concerning the “literary evolution of the supposed black sexual threat from subversive trickster figure to badman as overt arbiter of racial revenge” (15). His individual readings detail how sexual and racial anxieties about black masculinity are projected, displaced, and reinscribed through literary language. For example, Leiter underscores how White’s Fire in the Flint inverts the black beast stereotype, transferring the image of bestiality onto the white race in order to serve an African American political agenda. Light in August and Black No More, Leiter maintains, have a similarly radical function, addressing black masculinity while emphasizing the socially constructed nature of racial identity, undermining notions of essentialized and naturalized whiteness and blackness. Other texts play a more conservative role: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man reinscribes the threat of black masculinity despite Johnson’s conscious efforts to redeem and rewrite black identity. Likewise, Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Tate’s The Fathers mark reactionary endeavors that nod to the cultural and sexual anxieties at the core of the...

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