| I argue that the figure of the black male in American culture is intimately linked with "queer" (non-traditional, non-heterosexual) identity and sexuality. I take up Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic observation in Black Skin, White Masks that black(male)ness in Western culture is linked to fears and fantasies surrounding the body. The black male figure troubles Western narratives of self and identity, as Fanon argues, because of the figure's articulation to repressed sexuality or sexual fantasies, and also, as I argue, because the figure simultaneously fixes (in fantasy) and radically dislocates (in reality) the hope and desire in Western narratives for the liberation of transparent bodily experience.;Black(male)ness figures, in the psychoanalytic sense, both erection and castration, both power and lack of power---as is evident in the curiously doubled presence of the black male as the heterosexual rapist that women really want and the black male as an outraged victim of homosexual rape that I find resonant in the four African American literary works I place in conversation with Fanon: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Richard Wright's Eight Men, Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. In these works, the black male figure is a trope representing the knowledge of being hyper-masculine and yet not traditionally masculine. The two forms of knowledge are intimately related, for the black male trope figures the knowledge of hyper-masculinity precisely because it was historically created in what we might call the mind of the West, and the condition of its creation was the Atlantic slave trade, where black men were forced to occupy an abject, non-masculine role. I examine the appeal of power and hyper-masculinity in the black male figure, and the anxiety and precariousness always underlying the black male figure's signification of these qualities, but I emphasize the representation and value of the figure's apparent powerlessness. I maintain that "powerlessness" does not describe a disability but inscribes the black male figure's ability to reconfigure the dichotomies figured in the black/white binary. |
