University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2012 Masculinity In Comparative Black Literatures Latoya Renee Jefferson University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Jefferson, Latoya Renee, "Masculinity In Comparative Black Literatures" (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 549. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/549 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MASCULINITY IN COMPARATIVE BLACK LITERATURES Doctor of Philosophy English Department LaToya Jefferson December 2012 COPYRIGHT LATOYA JEFFERSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2012 ABSTRACT This project examines the ways in which Black men in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora define themselves as gendered beings in their fiction and drama beginning with Richard Wright’s publication of Native Son in 1940 to Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter published 1980. Black men created a transnational dialectic concerning their masculinity which involved the creation and criticism of several types of masculinity. In Chapters 1 and 2, I discuss the theoretical and the historical framework for this project. In Chapter 3, I discuss the first type of Black masculinity which was based in opposition to Euro-American stereotypes about African men and Black men in the New World. In chapter 4, I examine how Black male writers recognized the diversity within Africa and the Diaspora and consequently created masculine characters who reflected their local cultures. In Chapter 5, I analyze texts by Black women that critiqued Black men for silencing Black women in their texts. In Chapter 6, I discuss texts that feature Black male protagonists who grasp toward a definition of masculinity which actually depends upon gender complementarity and community harmony rather than individualized notions of masculinity. The concluding chapter explores a vitriolic disagreement between James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver and summarizes previous chapters. I have included an Appendix with other texts and issues which concern Black masculinity for future studies. ii DEDICATION I dedicate this work to Leroy “PaPa” Jefferson Sr. (1925-2003), my beloved grandfather, and Damien Ray Gibson (1973-2008), my brother who was lost too soon. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Dr. Adetayo Alabi, for believing in the project and for his guidance. I would also like to thank the dissertation committee for its recommendations. I would also like to thank Dr. Verner Mitchell and Dr. Earnestine Jenkins, both of the University of Memphis, for offering both guidance and support throughout this process. I would also like to thank the University of Mississippi for granting me the 2011 summer research award. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE i ABSTRACT ii DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: THE INHUMANE LEGACY OF THE ENLIGTENMENT: RACIALIZED DEGENDERING 37 CHAPTER 3: BLACK MEN, OPPOSITIONAL DEFINITIONS AND PRIMORDIAL AFRICA 65 CHAPTER 4: BLACK MASCULINE IDENTIES: FROM THEIR OWN HISTORIES 106 CHAPTER 5: CONCERNS OF THE HEART(H): BLACK MALE CHARACTERS IN BLACK WOMEN’S WRITINGS 152 CHAPTER 6: OUT OF NECESSITY: BLACK MEN EVALUATE DEFINITIONS OF MASCULINITY 201 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION 234 REFERENCES 244 APPENDIX 264 VITA 271 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Out of the fact that European well-being had been, for centuries, so crucially dependent on this subjugation had come that racisme from which all black men suffered. James Baldwin in “Nobody Knows My Name” I. Black Masculinity Scholarship In this project I explore how Black men use literature to interrogate identity and constantly articulate and explore what it means to be a Black man in the modern world. I focus on fiction and drama specifically for several reasons. Choosing to focus solely on drama and fiction written by Black men not only limit the scope and length of this project, but adheres to Abiola Irele’s argument in The African Imagination: Literature in African and the Black Diaspora that Black fiction and drama are often direct re-presentations of socio-historical experiences and confrontations with Euro-American societies that have been refracted through the prism of African and Black Diaspora literature. Second, fiction and drama allow for a bit more creative liberty than poetry, which is often succinct and very structured; writers are free to create new worlds in poetry, but always within that highly-structured framework. Third, unlike autobiography and other works of nonfiction, writers may creatively use historical events in order to tell their stories from certain perspectives. 1 Given the creative liberty and freedom in the fictional and dramatic worlds, I explore why Black male writers present protagonists and characters who seemed to have internalized Euro- American racist, patriarchal values and who continue to replicate marginalization inside their homes and communities by ignoring or silencing Black women who love them. In this sense, I am also extending the works of Black feminist critics such as Barbara Smith, Deborah McDowell, and bell hooks who ask that feminists view the texts Black males create about themselves in a cultural framework so that readers may understand how Black men across the Diaspora can recreate the same repression xenonormatively that they claim to detest when it is ontonormative.1 I became interested in Black masculinity as an undergraduate while taking courses in African and African American literatures. Questions of colonial/postcolonial African identities arose frequently in the African literature class, especially in the modern-day literature. Yet, that identity, especially when being formulated by a postcolonial philosopher, was almost always male. There was little to no room or space made available for the female African identity. In the African American literature classes, gender was not discussed explicitly throughout. For instance, slave narratives seemed slightly subversive on gender; freedom from the atrocities of slavery drove the discussion, but issues of gender lie slightly beneath the surface. However, I noticed that female and male narratives seemed bifurcated according to gender. Female narratives focused not only on themselves, but on slavery’s effect on their respective communities whereas male narratives seemed more focused on slavery’s impact on the individual and the development of acceptable gendered norms. Male writers, particularly Frederick Douglass, seemed preoccupied with forming and crafting a masculine identity for themselves and combating popular images of Black men in white American antebellum 2 literature. In this literature, Black males were usually portrayed as passive, cowardly, ignorant, and effeminate. Black male writers attempted to destroy this image. They not only spoke for their brothers and sisters in bondage, but also attempted to engage the white male philosophers and writers who claimed people of African descent had no histories or human identities and were not real men, but some kind of faux men.2 The lingering preoccupation with masculine identity in African American and Black Caribbean identity lasted long after Emancipation and it intrigued me. It seemed that proclaiming Black masculine agency to the Euro-American hegemonic masculinity that denied it culminated in claiming the ultimate subjectivity. Meanwhile, policies of European colonialism in Africa created similar conditions of suffering and oppression which manifest themselves in many anti-colonial, and even post- colonial, texts written by African writers. After the height of the Atlantic Slave Trade, European powers made sufficient advances into the African interior and expanded their territories as far as the current-day Congo. In 1889 at the Berlin Conference, after several centuries of exploitation, European powers officially divided the African continent among themselves with complete disregard of traditionally respected boundaries by Africans. Colonialist literature about Africa shared the same disregard for African peoples. In Euro-American literature, images of Africa appear as virginal territory for white men to conquer and tame while African people themselves serve as parts of the backdrop. Aside from an occasional grunt or yell, African people have no authentic voices in these texts. Texts like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea portray Africans as servants or objects. These prescribed roles evoked from African writers a response that is remarkably similar to that of their New World counterparts: a preoccupation with identity. From the autobiographical series produced by Wole Soyinka to the complicated fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua 3 Achebe, the African writers that I studied seemed just as concerned with masculine identity as their North American counterparts. Studying Caribbean literature for graduate studies, I found the same pattern among Black male writers like Walcott, Lamming, and Cèsaire. The identity at hand –the one that must be reclaimed with much urgency –was always an individualistic, masculine identity instead of the more communal ones crafted by Black female writers. In fact, the Black male writers in Africa and the Black Diaspora