"Are You Man Enough?": Imagining Ethiopia and Transnational Black Masculinity

On the day of the fight between Joe Louis and Primo Carnera in 1935, the June 25th issue of the Washington Post ran a cartoon that featured the Brown Bomber and his Italian rival. The image entitled "Shadows Before?" illustrates an imposing Carnera lurching to extend a jab and Louis angling forward to challenge his opponent. The most compelling feature of the image, however, is the depiction of the respective shadows of Louis and Carnera. While the dark silhouette of Carnera more or less accurately traces the figuration of his body, the one of Louis does not correspond to his bodily form. The head of Louis's shadow is illustrated with a bearded face, a crown upon his head, and with what appears to be dreadlocks. More disconcerting is the positioning of Louis's shadow, which is posed falling backwards as if toward defeat. While the darkened tonality of the silhouettes produce an ominous sense of foreboding, the labels "Ethiopia" and "Italy" attached to Louis and Carnera allegorize the bout as an international dilemma concerning the rise of European fascism during the early 1930s. The conflicts between Italy and Ethiopia would continue to escalate through the summer of 1935. When the war officially began in October, African American newspapers such as the Amsterdam News, Baltimore Afro-American, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Chicago Defender all covered the events extensively.

African Americans were captivated with the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Aid organizations were formed in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C., among other cities, to send funds to Ethiopian forces. The preeminent African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois published an article entitled "The Inter-Racial Implications of the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis" at the outset of the war. The historian and journalist J. A. Rogers reported the events for the Pittsburgh Courier. The poet Langston Hughes wrote a number of poems including "Call of Ethiopia," "Air Raid Over Harlem," and "Broadcast on Ethiopia." Later, around 1945, the visual artist William H. Johnson completed the painting Haile Selassie.

As significant as the preoccupation with the Italo-Ethiopian War was to the formation of African American interwar leftist politics, Ethiopia itself needs to be understood for how it becomes an important site to reconsider the relationship of transnationalism to constructions of black masculinity in the American imagination. During the time of the conflict, black men wanted to participate in the larger American campaigns against European fascism as a sign of their allegiance to the nation, but they also wanted to participate in causes that illustrated their racial affinities as diasporic subjects.¹ By prefiguring the issue of masculinity, I seek to underscore the gendered resonances of Ethiopia that have produced specific iterations of transnational black subjectivity. In what follows, I offer a reading of George Schuyler's novella Revolt in Ethiopia (1938-1939) and John Guillermin's film Shaft in Africa (1973) to understand how Ethiopia is imagined in twentieth-century black popular culture. Both Schuyler's serialized novella, appearing in the widely-circulated Pittsburgh Courier, and Guillermin's Shaft in Africa, appearing at the height of blaxploitation, offer a lens through which to examine the circulation of Ethiopia in the American popular imagination on both sides of the twentieth century. And, more specifically, both works deploy heteronormative discourses about sex and sexuality to articulate a particular form of radical transnational black politics.

Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands

Of all African countries, there has not been one that has captured the imagination of African Americans more than Ethiopia. In the nineteenth century, African Americans frequently invoked Ethiopia to demonstrate the contribution of blacks to human civilization and "Ethiop" was widely used as a term to identify nineteenth-century African Americans. Although Phillis Wheatley, for example, was from West Africa, she was commonly referred to as an "Ethiop" and William J. Wilson, a contributor to Thomas Hamilton's mid-century periodical Anglo-African Magazine, published under the pseudonym "Ethiop."² Du Bois used the name of the country in his 1913 pageant The Star of Ethiopia. Set in five parts-"The Gift of Iron," "The Dream...