Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement By Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Darieck B. Scott, Chair Professor Leigh Raiford Professor Waldo E. Martin Spring 2018 Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement © 2018 by Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas i Abstract Zealous Watchmen: Racial Authenticity, Masculine Anxiety and the Black Arts Movement by Zachary Daniel Manditch-Prottas Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Darieck B. Scott, Chair This project complicates and deepens black feminist and queer critiques that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) deployed misogyny and homophobia in the service of a masculinist vision of black liberation. Specifically, emphasizing the role of homosocial discourse in marshaling intraracial terms of black (in)authenticity. Zealous Watchmen proposes that key themes that mark Black Arts works—homophobic language, accusations of race treachery and of mimicry of purportedly white literary style, ambivalent observations of the “misguided masculinity” of black street hustlers—mutually constitute one another’s meaning around a common axis: the intent of the Black Arts authors not only to discipline but to emasculate other black men. I argue that bold proclamations regarding one’s status as a real black man were coupled with habitual accusations of failed black manhood articulated through a range of literary signifiers. Taking on the Black Arts’ most bombastic assertions of masculinity, as well as some of its more subtle rhetorical formulations, my analysis of textual discourse takes seriously the colloquial plea of “that’s not what I mean by that word(s),” probing it further, then, to ask what they did mean. Why use that word, towards such an end? What other words did BAM writers use to a comparable end? From what referential framework does this network of words and refrains draw? Zealous Watchman seeks to define and interrogate terms taken up by key Black Power/Black Arts intellectuals meant to signify black male failure. I do so in the interest of teasing out how seemingly disparate terms of disparagement intersect in their intent to define and police the boundaries of black masculine authenticity. In each chapter I orient my close reading of a canonical BAM text through one of the following key themes: homophobia, race traitorousness, authorial angst, and ostensive misguided masculinity and show them to be wedded in a mutually constitutive semiotic discourse. My study complicates how what can be read as distinct rhetorical challenges to authentic blackness and masculinity, should be understood as co-constitutive. I will argue this concentricity resulted in emasculative claims doubling as claims of racial failure and vice versa. While racial authenticity was the ultimate issue in Black Arts literature, I argue an unsteady and anxiety-ridden discourse of masculinity mediated and made legible compliance or disobedience to real blackness. Chapter 1 considers James Baldwin’s curious usage of homophobic epithets in No Name in the Street in response to Eldridge Cleaver’s notorious personal attacks to posit the discursive figure of the “faggot” as a non-sexual specific signifier of male abjection. Chapter 2 reads Amiri Baraka’s landmark play, Dutchman, to explicate the figure of the “Uncle Tom” as illustrative of ii the symbiotic relationship between tropes of interracial heterosexual desire, racial traitorousness, and effeminized white maleness. Chapter 3 uses the formative anthology Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro American Writing to survey the seemingly banal designation of “authorship” as a threatening abstraction from virile manhood that manifests as an articulation of racial angst. Chapter 4 steps beyond paragons of Black Arts and considers the virtual silence of Black Arts toward the alleged “misguided masculinity” prominent in the urban realism of pulp fiction novelist Donald Goines. Engaging with scholars across the fields of African American Studies, English, cultural history and gender and sexuality theory Zealous Watchmen contributes to the emergent interdisciplinary sub-field of Black Masculinity Studies. In the words of influential male feminist scholar, Michael Awkward, Masculinity Studies problematize the “unproblematized perceptions of monolithic and normative maleness.” In the case of Black Masculine Studies this entails the specific problematizing of, to borrow the phrasing of Darieck Scott, “blackened” maleness. The thematic focus of my project interrogates and disassembles notions of, or expectations for, a singular authentic black masculine identity within a cultural site where authentic masculinity was a core ambition. Zealous Watchmen shows that the reiterations of black masculinity set in dialectical relationship to those of negated black masculinity, and the fact of their chronic reiteration, serve as evidence that the Black Arts black masculine ideal was not, nor ever could be, realized. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments iv Introduction By Way of Apology: Amiri Baraka, Home and 1 Reassessing Black Arts Movement Homosocial Discourse Chapter 1 13 Meeting at the Watch Tower: James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street and the Re-Sexing of Homophobic Vernacular Chapter 2 42 Trying to Grow a Beard: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Interracial Sex and the Latent Threat of the “Uncle Tom” Chapter 3 66 Poems That Shoot Guns: The Masculine Crisis of Black Black Authorship in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing Chapter 4 88 Never Die Alone: Misguided Masculinity and the Marginalization of Donald Goines Afterword 127 Life After Death: Notorious BIG, The Last Poets and Making Manhood in the Shadow of the Black Arts Bibliography 132 iv Acknowledgements I spend a lot of time thinking about words and a fair amount of time trying to write them. I struggle with their limitations, I fear their subtle powers and I yearn for the capacity to make them say what I feel. I mention my fraught love of language because as I put closure on my doctorate I find myself indebted to so many extraordinary people and anxious to suitably express the depth of my gratitude. So, the following Donnie Hathaway lyric seems an apropos foregrounding before issuing my acknowledgments; “If my words don’t come together, listen to the melody, ‘cause my love is in there hiding.” Thank you to my brilliant and caring dissertation committee, Professor Darieck Scott, Leigh Raiford and Waldo Martin. Under their guidance I have always felt supported and I count myself very lucky. Thank you Waldo Martin, a wise and generous soul who is perhaps as cool as he is brilliant. His professional guidance, personal kindness and dusty treasure chest of 1970’s pulp novels (found in the attic!) feed not only my dissertation research but the new work I am now undertaking. Thank you Professor Raiford for skillfully and patiently coaching me through the many hoops and obstacles that litter the graduate school route and to whom I owe a great deal of my growth as an interdisciplinary thinker. Her counsel always came through as a delicate bond of personal care and professional expectation that I benefited from, respected and hope to emulate as an adviser. Most of all, thank you to my chair and adviser, Darieck Scott. In my near decade of graduate study between Berkeley and Columbia no single scholar has so impacted my thinking. From my first semester Darieck has always been my most trusted and earnest critic, urging and guiding me to think clearly and deeply. He taught me to work through, never around, the most difficult topics and that such a path required a commitment to make analysis and affect critical partners. If I am a good scholar it is because he taught me how to be one. Thank you Professor Ula Taylor and Lindsey Herbert. While not on my dissertation committee you were both the co-chairs of my graduate school experience committee. Indeed, I am no anomaly in this respect. I am forever grateful to Lindsey for her patience and grace as she helped me through...well, just about any and every problem the university presented. Professor Taylor’s care and joy knows no bounds, she is an awe-inspiring force of good will. I proudly add myself to the long, long list of people who have been profoundly impacted by her and will address my debt by paying forward the care she provided me (in my own modest way) to my future colleagues and students. Also, I will always be happy to look after Leenah for a few hours so she can get some of her own work done! Thank you friends. My dear cohorts, Brukab Sisay, Essence Harden, Kathryn Benjamin Golden and Selena Makena, there are no four people I would rather have had this experience with. I look forward to us all being on the same faculty when that little angel, Amiri, starts his Ph.D. Thank you Mahasan Chaney, Jarvis Givens, Christina Bush, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Michael J. Myers II and Ianna Hawkins Owen. Thank you for making me laugh as often as you made think, for holding my work to a high standard and supporting me when I was in low places. I am grateful that my seven years in this program has afforded me life-long friends. Thank you Mom and Dad. There is no way I could undertake a degree like this, let alone complete it, without their unwavering love and support. I do hope I make them proud, because all I do is try to honor the example they set. They taught me that kindness is more important than intelligence, and that intelligence without kindness is something to be wary of. They taught me that critical rigor should always be matched by considerate patience.