Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages

Yet this white dehumanizing endeavor has left its toll in the psychic scars and personal wounds now inscribed in the souls of black folk. These scars and wounds are clearly etched on the canvas of black sexuality.

—Cornel West

We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation.

—Stuart Hall ¹

Placed together, Stuart Hall and Cornel West's statements not only attest to the malleability of bodies and the almost irrevocable fixity of racism's traumatic incisions; the shared trope of the canvas implicitly asks for an analysis of the relations between racism, the sexed and gendered economies that underpin the visual and physical signs of race, and visual art. ² While contemporary cultural theorists have demonstrated the necessity of seeing race's inextricable ties to gender and sexuality, visual art is not frequently included in the project of elucidating the various and often profoundly visual manifestations of these ties.

This essay argues that the visual art of Romare Bearden and the literary art of Ralph Ellison work to remake the "canvas" of black masculinity, and what is at stake in this remaking deepens in clarity and complexity when we see and read their work together. Though their work is not often considered simultaneously, and is usually not analyzed in terms of its representations of masculinity, the work of Bearden and Ellison elucidate the possibilities for and impediments to remaking the visual representations of the black male. ³ Their work creates rhythms of destruction and creation that acknowledge the facticity of racism's contribution to the construction of masculinity and the possibility of reconfiguring its effects. ⁴

Calling attention to the simultaneity of European definitions of sexuality and imperialism, Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien argue that "the prevailing Western concept of sexuality . . . already contains racism" ("Race" 106). These intersections and mutual definitions become all the more intractable when sexed and gendered representations become crucial parts of ego formations that serve as recoveries from and reactions against racism's traumatic negation and fragmentation of the black male body. In American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Robyn Wiegman offers an example that dramatically underscores all that is stake—historically, psychically—in the intersections of race and gender. She explains that for the African-American slave, possessing a clearly discernible gendered identity provided "possibilities of escaping the category of the inhuman" (11).

The fact that there has been more scholarship attentive to the "interlocking" forms of oppression that black women have found themselves within as they struggled to occupy the category of the human attests to, rather than detracts from, the importance of analyzing the relations between masculinity and race. ⁵ In his recent study Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (2002), Maurice O. Wallace draws upon a variety of recent work in gender studies scholarship to make a broad claim about race's undeniable presence in the construction of masculinity:"[a]t no point in the history of the New World . . . has race not constituted a defining feature of our national manhood" (2). Elucidating the multiple and insidious ways in which racial hierarchies reinforce the hegemony of white masculinity, Mercer and Julien argue that "another turn of the screw of oppression" occurs when "black men subjectively internalize and incorporate aspects of the dominant definitions of masculinity in order to contest the conditions of dependency and powerlessness which racism and racial oppression enforce" ("Race" 112). If it follows that not only representations and concepts of race, but racism's lived and psychic inscriptions are inextricable from gender and sexuality, then how to challenge and destabilize racism's crucial role in the construction of black masculinity, instead of simply substituting positive images for those that are negative, remains a difficult question. ⁶

A dynamic university lecture that appears as a vivid memory in Ellison's Invisible Man (1952),offers...