Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood? Meditations on African-American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social Menace: An Introduction

I am an invisible man.

—Ralph Ellison

I was not there, yet I was there.

—Ernest J. Gaines

The experience of the black-as-body becomes, not merely a Self-Other conflict, nor simply Hegel's torturous Master-Slave dialectic, but a variation on both these conditions, intensified by the particularity of the body's appearance as black, as "stained," lacking interiority, and, as Fanon writes, as being "overdetermined from without." The body as opaque and consciousness as invisible is developed in Cleaver's brief essay ["The Primeval Mitosis" in Soul on Ice ]. And if that consciousness is not experienced by the Other as invisible, it is the repository for the offscum of racial relations—to black subjectivity is attributed the contents that white consciousness itself fears to contain or confront: bestial sexuality, uncleanliness, criminality, all purported "dark things."

—Charles Johnson

Given its preeminence in American and African-American literary history, one might think of Ellison's magnum opus as the "Bible" of contemporary African-American writing, functioning as the genesis of postmodern black writing much as Hemingway apotheosized Huckleberry Finn as the grounding narrative for the modern American novel. ¹ Certainly, the novel's opening five words, their syntactically discrepant assertion of agency and absence, capture the dominant cultural episteme with respect to the bases of black ontology: the paradox of both being and (not) being black. The first-person subject pronoun "I," whose referent is "invisible," reifies absence; the oxymoronic and incongruous "invisible man" hearkens back to Frederick Douglass' similarly self assertive and self-erasive characterization of himself as an "American Slave" in the title of the great patri-narrative of African-American men's literary genealogy. As the Invisible Man's fictive descendant, Gaines's Grant Wiggins, the schoolteacher protagonist in his 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying, declares a corresponding absent presence during the murder trial of a semi-literate young black male whom the state will subsequently execute for a crime he did not commit. Grant's chimerical sense of self is occasioned by the trial itself: his utterance bespeaks a cultural narrative that collapses distinctions between education and ignorance, freedom and imprisonment, guilt and innocence. These fictive testaments to black male social and corporeal annihilation make Ishmael Reed's effusively over-the-top declaration that "[b]eing a black man in America is like being a spectator at your own lynching" (16) more than mere rhetorical jujitsu. African-American literature about men has chronicled blackness in the white American imaginary, where metaphorical and occasional physical "lynchings"—notwithstanding Clarence Thomas's self-serving invocation of the term—are part and parcel of black men's social, discursive, and physical reality.

If incendiary discursive and actual lynchings from the 1990s to the embryonic years of the 21st century have confirmed nothing else, we would say that they lend credence to novelist Charles Johnson's eloquent assessment of blackness-as-pathology, the prominent cultural interpretation that has maintained the most historical currency. One can read an amalgam of white-hot racial nodes from the 1990s to April 2003 as Johnson's theory/thesis writ large. Thus, the ambush-assassination of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York's Finest, the drag-lynching of James Byrd and subsequent refusal of Texas governor George W. Bush to attend the funeral, and the media frenzy surrounding guilty-innocent all-American Orenthal James Simpson all have a common thread. These men's experiences instantiate the dominant ethos that Johnson advances—blackness as threatening, feral, sexually bestial. In James Byrd's tragic instance, the very being-ness of the black body makes it susceptible to "overdetermination" and concomitant extermination.

Most recently, the Jayson Blair episode and the paroxysmal response to it have become further evidence that, in America's Manichean racial modus operandi, the difference between black-male-as-(wannabe...