Race Men (review)

Race Men. Hazel V. Carby. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. 228. $24.00 (cloth).

In her well-known 1980 essay "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," Deborah E. McDowell suggests that one of the major challenges facing "the black feminist critic is a thoroughgoing examination of the works of black male writers," and she further notes that in cases where black feminists have already examined black male writers, "much of the scholarship has been limited to discussions of negative images of black women found in the work of these authors." ¹ In her pivotal 1987 book, Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby further theorizes a black feminist criticism whose method and subject matter can move beyond assumptions of an autonomous, unitary black female language and literary tradition. Such assumptions, Carby suggests, are grounded in a homologous identity between "black women as critics and black women as writers who represent black women's reality." ² In terms of critical method, this means that rather than making black women's writing her sole object of study, Carby presciently analyzes the contested ideological relations among texts by blacks and whites, men and women, as well as the ideological contradictions of race, gender, and class operating differently across and within texts by black women--a critical practice that has become more common in the last decade.

It seems an almost natural step for Carby's more recent book, Race Men, not to take up black women's literature as the obligatory subject of study. Instead, Race Men, originally delivered as the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, makes a signal contribution to the quickly emerging field of black masculinity studies. As in other landmark studies in this field, Carby demonstrates the interaction among literary, popular, and mass cultural reproductions of black male identity, as she helpfully foregrounds the negotiations between, on the one hand, black men's self-figuration as agents of racial and national progress and, on the other hand, the hegemonic, often coercive ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race serving both to articulate and to limit their attempts at masculine self-expression and self-definition. ³

As a title and as an organizing theoretical concept highlighting the tense interplay bonding black men's racial status to their sexual identification, "race men" resonates powerfully as the label used historically to name African American men's claims both to full manhood rights within the nation-state and to the individual's militant capacity for leadership, spokesmanship, protection, and uplift of the whole race. It should be pointed out that some African American women resisted the limiting gender implications of this phrase by naming themselves "race women." The gender asymmetry intrinsic in the analogy indicates, however, the difficulties of balancing the (masculine) assertiveness of the "race man" with the kindred (masculine?) assertions of the "race woman." Race Men fully comprehends the historical weight of this gender imbalance and does not attempt simplistically to redress it by presenting overlooked "race women" to even the scales. Instead, Carby chooses the more challenging approach of focusing solely on "race men" for the explicit purpose of deconstructing their claims to racial representativeness, a notion that continues to influence race criticism. Thus "[T]he intellectual work of black women and gay men is not thought to be of enough significance to be engaged with, argued with, agreed or disagreed with. Thus terms like women, gender, and sexuality have a decorative function only" (5).

Ironically, to unhinge black men's continuing intellectual hegemony based in claims of racial representativeness, Carby focuses almost exclusively on black men as representational subjects of American national identity. Curiously, she moves away from the theoretical innovation of Reconstructing Womanhood, in which the material, historical, and discursive conditions of African American womanhood could be understood only through contextual, comparative analysis of its ideological mediation among white womanhood, black manhood, and white manhood. Thus, even as Race Men provides an important and compelling series of studies of particular figurations of black masculinity and sexuality across high, popular, and...