Trans-American Constructions of Black Masculinity: Dany Laferriere, le Negre, and the Late Capitalist American Racial machine-desirante

Dany Laferrière's literary writings explode North American constructions of black masculinity, and in this paper, I explore how Laferrière configures le Nègre as an explosive dynamic within the late capitalist, American machine-désirante (“desiring machine”). As a Haitian-born writer who has lived in New York, Montréal, and Miami, as well as in Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve, Laferrière diasporizes constructions of black masculinity within trans-American landscapes. Splicing recent cultural criticism on black masculinity by African American scholars with theoretical writings by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the “desiring machine,” this paper offers a re-reading of Laferrière's first and still most scandalous novel Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, focusing on the author's textual engagements with other black men--James Baldwin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miles Davis, Chester Himes, Spike Lee, Derek Walcott, Richard Wright, and Frantz Fanon, but especially Himes and Fanon--rather than his protagonist's sexploits with archetypal white women (Miz Littérature, Miz Beauté, Miz Suicide, and a coterie of others). Laferrière thus enters into the “sexual-textual” boxing ring of the American cultural imaginary: by engaging in ideological debate with other black male writers, Laferrière reveals how race-sex operates within the late capitalist, American “desiring machine” and shows how this operative mechanism can be exploited to jam the cultural machine.