Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson, and: The Origins of African American Literature: A History of the African American Literary Presence, 1680-1865 (review)

The writer's struggle to gain a voice has been an abiding and resonant theme in African American literary history. Over the last decade, however, postmodern critics have remained skeptical about the African American writer's ability to achieve this self-determined or resignifying authorial voice, while feminist critics have accused male authors of fighting to achieve an Anglo-European model of masculinity at the expense of women. Although investigating different periods of African American literary history, Keith Clark and Dickson Bruce challenge us to rethink these doubts about an authoritative voice in early African American history, or in Clark's case, an alternative masculine voice that struggles under the shadow of Wright's Bigger Thomas. Their rereadings of the African American writer's struggle for voice, or manhood, are, though at times without nuance, important contributions. In contrast to Clark's theoretical approach, Bruce attempts to answer postmodern naysayers through the meticulous amassing of archival sources. While Bruce's recovery project is an important resource for scholars, his survey ultimately needs a clearer definition of what is meant by an African American voice.

In his study of three post–World War II writers fashioning new subjectivities for black men, Clark draws heavily upon feminist and queer studies of black masculinity, astutely extending and pushing the theories he uses. Clark first excavates, through a reading of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Frederick Douglass, the dominant protest discourse against which subsequent African American writers have had to position themselves and, in an age of anxiety, rewrite. In this protest tradition, black men's lives are reduced to unlayered stories of victimization and the reclaiming of manhood. Such a "deformed black male subject" (17) tries to achieve the autonomy and privileges of white patriarchy, without questioning its often misogynist and violent mythic ideals. Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, in contrast, are concerned with the "interiority" of black men's lives (41), which is often hidden in U.S. culture's portrayal of them as violent, hypersexual thugs and in some men's embracing of these norms for their compensatory status and power. In elaborating on how these writers bear witness to the invisible social needs and emotional pain of African American men, Clark focuses on their characters' desire for intimacy and connection. In his close textual exegesis, Clark demonstrates how Gaines, Wilson, and Baldwin depict characters who emerge as "communally connected subjects" (74).

Clark is a sensitive reader particularly attuned to some of the oversimplications and omissions of trendy theories applied to black men's lives. In his focus on black male intersubjectivity, he extends the feminist scholarship that often names community as the province of women, and he shrewdly questions the white perspective in queer theory when it tries to universalize the lone "artist as sexual outlaw" (53) as a standard for African American queers who remain tied to their race, family, and community. Filling in some of the gaps in gender studies, Clark also examines the sites (from pool halls to barber shops to prisons) where distinct notions of black masculine community and identity are imaginatively constructed. Although one might quibble at times with Clark's reading of individual authors or texts—a broader study of Baldwin's works, for example, might implicate Baldwin more in the modernist idea of the isolated male artist than Clark allows—Black Manhood is a significant study for helping us hear more clearly the "voices of countless native and invisible sons" (131).

While Bruce's method and period of focus differ from Clark's, his...