How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism, Masculinity, and Performativity

This essay reconsiders the Black Power movement's cultural politics by arguing that these advocates suffered from the contradictions and anxieties produced as they legitimated a highly performative mode of masculine speech as a cornerstone of their nationalism. Framing John Oliver Killens's career as an especially keen extension of these tensions, the essay explores how he endorsed the performative turn even as his novel The Cotillion tracked out its inevitable limitations. Placing Killens's work alongside that of his contemporaries, the essay paints a portrait of a nationalism that was deeply divided by the very agenda that it created.