Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

Introduction: Searching for the “New Black Man”? From Masculine Ideality to Progressive Black Masculinities

3 Introduction Searching for the “New Black Man”? From Masculine Ideality to Progressive Black Masculinities i฀was฀first฀introdUced฀to฀richard฀wright’s NatIve SoN in฀an฀UndergradUate฀ African American literature course.My professor explained that in 1940,the year Native Son was published,Wright’s novel was considered revolutionary. He asserted that the novel’s greatness resided in several areas: its constructions of black masculinity; its use of naturalism and the sociological insights of Robert Park and the Chicago School; its establishment of the boundaries of protest fiction; and its overall objective to show how Bigger’s humanity was diminished by his impoverished and oppressive environment. While I appreciated the novel’s historical and political significance to American literature, and African American literature in particular, I was disturbed by Wright’s depictions of black women as emasculators and co-conspirators with white men in the oppression of black men. No one had prepared me for the extent of the hate and violence directed at women, especially black women, in Native Son. I had never even conceived that black women could be positioned as complicit with white men to keep black men in bondage. Perhaps naively, I believed that black men and women were natural allies in the fight to overcome racist oppression. Richard Wright’s Native Son offered a far less flattering portrait. My problems with Wright, and, indeed, my professor’s glorification of his black patriarchal politics, forced me to reconsider my understanding of black community and the importance of sexism, patriarchy, domination, and power to any examination of racism. It also compelled me to think critically about the historical relations of race, power, class, and gender that produced—and produces—such adversarial relations between black men and women. I also wanted to consider the extent to which these same relations existed outside the pages of Wright’s text. I understood even then that such divisions undermined the power of black solidarity and liberation 4฀ ฀ introdUction struggles. With an eye toward identifying and exploring such destructive patterns, my study examines the representations, frameworks, and contexts these structures rest upon and identifies alternative constructions of powerful , liberatory, and nurturing black masculine identities. Focusing on black male texts from the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass to the prose of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, my study addresses the ways women’s bodies are used and misused in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. Through tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, what I make clear is that black men’s struggles for gendered agency are inextricably bound up with their complicated love-hate relation to (white) normative masculinity. The historical context in which I couch these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize their identities.While I ground this analysis in the economies of gendered racism to show how these structures continue to shape contemporary representations of black manhood and womanhood, I also engage texts that problematize traditional constructions of black masculinity to trace how idealized masculinities and femininities are interrogated by black men themselves. The emergence of black male feminist consciousnesses, signified in part by cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal’s concept of the “new black man,” are reshaping the production of black male and female identities for a new century . Consequently, through examining representations of black masculinity via the lens of black female/male feminisms to distinguish productions of progressive black masculinities,I highlight collaboratively gendered constructions of black identities to further interventions within oppositional intraracial discourses and analyses. This analysis is based within the methodologies of black feminist, black masculinist, and black male feminist critical discourses. And it is through studying the typography of critical discussions of black masculine ideality that this study’s importance emerges. While current studies acknowledge the importance of examining the roles of women within black masculine identity production, few explore the economies and effects of these productions in specific ways. Understanding the specificity of these productions is important to interrogating the centrality of women’s bodies to masculine identity formation and developing more progressive, collaborative, and introdUction฀ ฀ 5 liberatory alternative gender identities. Mapping the terms of the critical discussions and debates from which conceptions of the economies of black masculine ideality emerge is a crucial first step to...