Masculinity

Any discussion of African-descended men as a group must first acknowledge their multifarious differences rooted in particular histories, nationalities, religions, languages, cultures, sexualities, and socioeconomic classes. Nonetheless, due to a larger shared history entangled in European imperial conquest, chattel enslavement, and colonialism, diasporan men can instructively be understood as possessing, if not an identical, at least a similar relation to maleness.

Slavery, Insurgency, and the Origins of Black Male Subjectivity

The origins of the notion that some men are naturally superior to others remain obscure, but it probably can be traced to the earliest hunter-gatherer societies. Even though many ancient practices of masculine aggression and domination arose from and contributed to tribal, clan, and ethnic rivalries, they were not structured on modern notions of racial difference. In Europe during the Middle Ages, the devil, demons, and saints' executioners were sometimes imaged as dark-faced men. Highly allegorical and fantastic in nature, these emblems conflated the color black—symbolizing melancholy, death, sin, and the unknown—with a general notion of ethnic difference, as the executioners of Christ were sometimes represented as monstrous dark men or black Jews. At the same time, the other most prominent artistic image of black maleness in the medieval era was a redemptive figure, the black Magi, one of the three Wise Men who brought gifts to the Christ child. Clearly, the concept of black maleness was a malleable abstraction based in religious allegory, limited geographic knowledge (terra incognita), and ethnocentric fears and fantasies. By the twelfth century, Europeans had already begun to establish rudimentary notions of ethnicized manhood in terms of what Felipe Fernández-Armesto calls "Europe's 'internal' primitives: the peripheral, pastoral, bog or mountain folk, like the Basques, Welsh, Irish, Slavs and pagan Scandinavians" (1987, p. 225).

Although the interaction and intermixing between Europeans and Africans is a long, complicated affair dating to prehistory, the racial construct of masculinity emerges most markedly in response to European exploration, the succeeding colonization of native peoples, and particularly the rise of the transatlantic African slave trade. European literature of this era of exploration and colonization provides evidence of how the discourse on darkerskinned men as a "race" apart was still unsettled, if formative. The most celebrated representation of such a figure, William Shakespeare's tragic eponymous hero of Othello (1604), images the Moor not only as a great military leader but also as a gentleman of the highest character. While Othello seems to belong to the noble "race" of aristocrats born to rule, some characters use color epithets to attack him, and the play flirts with references to his African features marking him as racially alien, ignoble, inferior, and bestial. Eighty years later, in Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, a True History (1688), Aphra Behn absorbed, and helped to disseminate, a racial ideology that gendered black male identity as a Noble Savage. Behn constructed Oroonoko from a combination of long-established Oriental myth

and newly emerging racial consensus about Africandescended men, whose increasing association with the debased condition of chattel signals their deficit as both less than human and also less than manly. Othello and Oroonoko embody the binaristic representation of black manliness that dominated the discourse for centuries: on the one hand, the black man represents a naturally virile, seductively commanding, savage presence eliciting desire and fear; on the other, he is projected as a servile, childlike, desexualized presence eliciting pity and contempt.

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, visual representations of dark-skinned men in European art turned repeatedly to the image of a boyish page standing at service to Europeans. As we can see in William Hogarth's satire on English gluttony and excess, the dark skin of this figure betokens his servile nature, which in turn confirms the white patriarch's civilized refinement, mercantile accumulation, and natural right to rule—all lampooned by Hogarth. The most prolific image of black maleness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century also used a servile pose ironically to proselytize on behalf of slave abolition. Entitled "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" this medallion figures the black male slave manacled and kneeling in a pleading position. Despite the beneficent abolitionist intention, the emblems of this medallion partake in a global visual grammar of black male dependence, implying that only Europeans, particularly white men, can answer the question of the Negro's relation to the brotherhood of man, for only they have the power to bring an end to slavery.

During the Enlightenment, the racial concept of masculinity intensified with the development of scientific classification systems in natural history. Paradoxically, the same men who articulated the Enlightenment principles of natural rights, individual worth, universal reason, and manhood equality simultaneously erected a rationale for racial difference based in gender disparity. Enlightenment thinkers like Charles de Secondat-Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel theorized the natural right to property, progeny, and shared political power as the foundation of white male freedom and subjectivity. In his 1830s lectures on history, Hegel makes this logic absolute by suggesting that Africans exist totally outside of world history, and thus outside of the natural progress toward self-conscious human (i.e., masculine) mastery, subjectivity, and freedom brought about by world-historical great (white) men.

Against the dominant image of natural slavishness, black men—captive and free—were storming the world stage performing virile feats from which these Enlightenment thinkers wanted to exclude them—perhaps out of a subliminal reaction to the rising tide of African men boldly displaying their mettle in Europe and America. They manned the ships that bridged the Atlantic, fought alongside European men in international wars, led slave insurrections that rattled the white masters with constant fright, and governed free Maroon societies in open defiance of armed militias across the Americas. They also infiltrated European societies through public enactments of critical self-reflection, literary and artistic accomplishment, political protest, and sometimes interracial marriage.

As black men began to tell their stories in slave narratives, they sometimes pleaded for mercy, but they also more assertively demanded their right to ownership of their own persons, manhood emancipation, and political equality. Some, like the autobiographer Olaudah Equiano (1750–1797), used the tactic of adopting—almost mimetically—the clothes, manners, poses, habits, and values of European gentlemen as a way of exposing the arbitrary logic of racial classification and the hypocrisy of Christian morals, universal reason, and equal rights. Through his famous Interesting Narrative, and the portrait that fronts it, he presents the image of a regular gentleman, educated, worldly, Christianized, disciplined, and enterprising. Other Negro men followed his example, using literacy, free African heritage, or a public display of their own manly bodies and alert minds to carve out spaces of manly subjectivity in an environment hostile to their humanity and, particularly, their assertion of being free men. Among the most notable of these men were Francis Williams of Jamaica, Frederick Douglass of the United States, Juan Francisco Manzano of Cuba, and Ottobah Cugoano of Grenada.

Rebellious slaves and freed men constantly troubled the profit-making engines of slave ships, plantations, and great houses. Kidnapped Africans sometimes fought back under alien conditions that cut them off from the resources of their native lands, as in the celebrated case of Sengbe (or Cinque), who in 1839 led a rebellion aboard a slave ship. When Nathaniel Jocelyn painted his portrait for posterity, the artist imagined him in the Oroonoko tradition of the Noble Savage. At other times, New World Africans were motivated to insurgency by a combination of factors related to masculine enactments of belligerent self-defense, religious prophecy, and revolutionary consciousness, partly inspired by the American and French Revolutions.

After the success of the Haitian Revolution, led by Toussaint-Louverture, revolutionary violence was buttressed by a vision of black republican nationalism. As Toussaint was lauded by European intellectuals and artists as a sort of black George Washington, black revolutionaries took him as a model of violently sacrificial determination, an image enhanced by his martyrdom in a French prison. In the United States, organizers of slave rebellions and conspiracies, such as Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner, rallied their troops using the Haitian example. Abolitionist propagandists like David Walker and Martin Robison Delany forged a Pan-African-American consciousness in which colored men, aided by women, would rise to arms in a systematic revolution across the Americas. As men of African descent revised, subverted, and rejected the dominant discourse of black male savagery, servility, and commodification in multiple ways, they staked their claim to manhood emancipation, as well as to the "free" subjectivity endowed by this masculine claim.

Race Men, New Negroes, and Emancipated Citizenry

From England in 1772 to Brazil in 1888, nations gradually outlawed slavery. If, on the one hand, emancipation meant freedom from forced labor for males and females, for men of color it also possessed a double connotation, suggesting the ongoing struggle for those rights and privileges granted to white men upon reaching the age of adult emancipation. Although frequently working with women of color to extend political, property, and civil rights to all humans, many black men also concentrated on forging a culture of emancipated manliness. They formed fraternal lodges, secret

societies, and other organizations devoted to tutoring men for civic responsibility. They forged political organizations and movements to agitate for full citizenship or national independence. They formed labor unions, self-help enterprises, business cooperatives, and other agencies devoted to industrial and economic uplift. And with interested whites and black women, they formed religious, cultural, and educational institutions, most frequently headed by males. Out of this maelstrom of masculine tutelage, they shaped notions of the "manhood of the race"—the idea that black men had an obligation to head the racial family, to defend women and children, to modernize themselves in industry and commerce, and to lead the struggle for full inclusion in the patrimony of their respective nations (Carby, 1998; Wallace, 2002; Ross, 2004).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the question arose of how to fit colored men, whether former slave or colonial subject, for a useful position in the industrial economy—that is, how to train them for industry while forestalling their demands for political equality, economic parity, and national independence. Booker T. Washington promulgated the notion of the "accommodating" Negro leader. Honing his public image with careful detail, as in the photograph of him surveying the Tuskegee

grounds on his horse, Washington fostered a political and media machine that, on the one hand, calmed fears of black unrest, migration, and insurgency, while, on the other, popularized the notion that a black man could legitimately lead the Negro race by emulating the self-made myth of white male mentors. Washington's model of industrial education and accommodating black male leadership spread to the West Indies, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The reaction to Washington was intensely ambivalent, frequently colored by the idea that he was unmanning the race and stalling its progress. Conflicting strategies for racial modernization and renewal were brought to the fore through a figure often labeled the "New Negro." One of Washington's most influential foes, W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, charged in his early writings that Negroes would remain a "bastard" race until exceptional, confident, uncompromising black men trained themselves to join with the best men of the white race to lift up the masses. Inspired by Washington's notion of economic self-help, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey developed an international male-headed organization focused on the display of militant blackness, military order, and pride in African heritage. The gallant uniformed black horsemen of the cavalry unit of Garvey's Universal African Legions powerfully communicated the heroic nature of their nationalizing endeavor.

Other New Negro agendas encouraged the cultivation of "race men" in diverse ways. Leading race men often concentrated their efforts on molding an urbane, cosmopolitan race consciousness, one that wavered between political agitation and avant-garde aestheticism, between European mastery and Pan-African separatism, and between elite literariness and black folk identity. This versatile program of race renewal, called the New Negro Renaissance, or Négritude among Francophone-African and Caribbean advocates, positioned men like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke of the United States, Arturo Schomburg and Jesús Colón of Puerto Rico, Eric Williams and George Padmore of Trinidad, Claude McKay of Jamaica, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Aimé Césaire of Martinique, and Léon Damas of Guiana in highly visible positions of cultural influence in metropolitan capitals like New York City, Paris, and London.

The demand for political rights and cultural renewal was intimately connected to black men's struggle for economic autonomy in labor systems that prevented the traditional role of family provider and head of house. Due to the legacy of chattel enslavement, a general perception of black male workers tended to view them as lagging in agrarian and personal service sectors. In his pivotal portrayal of black manhood cast from Freudian, sociological, and Marxist theory, Richard Wright constructs the mentality of Native Son 's Bigger Thomas by playing on this perception of black men's working-class unconsciousness. In other works, Wright and other black male writers spotlighted the revolutionary potential of the emerging black working class. Similarly, the psychiatrist and cultural theorist Frantz Fanon used his own experience of anticolonial struggle in Martinique, France, and Algeria to develop complex psychoanalytic theories of racialized gender dynamics, suggesting the need to overcome a black male mentality deformed and paralyzed by racial-colonial oppression through the process of psychologically transformative revolutionary action. As blacks became increasingly attracted to political radicalism and the labor movement, particularly in the 1930s, the radical black laborer and union man became an explosive figure of social change. Black men flocked to new unions, many organized by a new generation of working-class-identified black male leaders, such as Tubal Uriah Butler in Trinidad, Norman

Manley and William Alexander Bustamante in Jamaica, and A. Phillip Randolph and Angelo Herndon in the United States. Labor organizing set the stage for mass anticolonial and other forms of political protest in unprecedented numbers.

In the middle years of the twentieth century, black men argued the benefits of a militantly violent masculine upheaval versus a more pacific tactic of manhood reform through peaceful mass resistance. After Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolent resistance to wrest India from the British Empire, black men were attracted to the image of the singular colored man of great moral courage leading (literally or symbolically) a disciplined phalanx of followers against the mighty armed empire. Revising this strategy to combat white supremacy in the United States, the mass movements identified with Martin Luther King Jr. constructed a black male leadership with arms linked in the front line of progress but taking the high moral ground through disciplined nonviolence. As famous photographs from the Memphis sanitation workers' strike indicate, this stance was intended to communicate not only the arrival of full citizenship but also the claim of uncompromising manhood identity. Answering across the ages the abolitionist "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" medallion, each of the demonstrators carried a sign with the simple slogan, "I Am a Man"—as if the assertion of manhood itself could alter the oppressive reality of economic deprivation and social marginality.

All across Africa, the West Indies, and North America, a more belligerent face was also being placed on the anticolonial movements for national independence. Black nationalist ideology appealed directly to the fierce black man as guerilla warrior, committed to the blood brotherhood of violent self-defense. Eschewing Gandhi and King, many black male youths adopted as their heroes such national liberation fighters as the Mau Mau (the secret brotherhood of armed resistance initiated by the Gikuyu in Kenya), Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and Fidel Castro of Cuba. Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and other black nationalists and liberationists in the United States figured the imperialist West as a white man mired in the decadence of an overly affluent consumer civilization. This was an effeminate figure, and thus vulnerable to a robust vanguard of black male liberators.

Black Manhood in Crisis?

In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, the faces and bodies of black men proliferated in a mass media driven by the consumption of the new, the shocking, and the taboo. On the one hand, the media offered up myriad model black men, a revision of Washington's good clean Negro. At first, this concentrated on men who broke color barriers in sports, the military, politics, literature, popular music, and entertainment. As long as the black men breaking these barriers were represented as Good Negroes who dutifully demonstrated their competence in an alliance with white society, the threat of new interracial interactions could be minimized. Along with King, Sidney Poitier best embodied this impulse, as he rose to global celebrity through movies that repeatedly plotted the theme of an incorruptible black manhood eager to aid and save whiteness from itself. From Joe Louis to Lenox Lewis in boxing, from Goose Tatum to Michael Jordan in basketball, from Garry Sobers to Brian Lara in cricket, and countless others in various sports, the black male athlete became so visible as to cause some white men to rehash the mythology of black biological difference, this time as natural physical superiority, a notion already embedded in the slave owners' argument that only Africans could withstand hard labor in the tropics.

The black superstar's hypervisibility in mass media seemed to contradict a growing sense of alarm over the future of ordinary black men. A common worry at the turn of the twenty-first century focused on the concept of black male crisis in various guises. In the United States, persistently low educational levels, high unemployment, high incarceration rates, female-headed families, drug addiction, gang crime and homicide, suicide, AIDS, and other social problems caused some to declare black men an "endangered species." Similarly, in the Caribbean and Africa, where the AIDS epidemic was devastating populations, black men were often scapegoated as promiscuous carriers whose traditional sexual customs threatened to depopulate whole nations—a literalization of the backward African. The media focused attention on corrupt, murderous African and Caribbean heads of state—constantly raising the specter of a black manhood incapable of managing its national household after winning emancipation.

If the quotidian experience of black male identity remained largely inaudible and off-screen, scandalous controversies over black men's integrity, sexuality, and criminality were spotlighted in a variety of venues, giving rise to a whole subfield of sociological discourse trained on understanding black male deviance. The public image of black men, however, was not only proliferating, it was also splintering in response to larger social and sexual movements. As black gay men took a page from black feminists, they began to demand a visible place in black communities—challenging black homophobia and coaxing an enlarged sense of brotherly bonding across sexual orientation (Beam, 1986; Hemphill, 1991).

Ironically, the postmodern culture of hip-hop often turned these anxieties over black male identity into profitable commodities. Hyping the world's fascination with black male danger and trouble, many hip-hop artists exorcised these demons by performing them on stage and screen, and they sometimes converted the performance of menacing danger into an actual living out of it. Intensifying the phenomenon of hypervisibility, hip-hoppers like Tupac Shakur bared their hardened bodies to a seduced public, who in turn consumed those bodies as an authentic embodiment of black male jeopardy—a belated historical

repetition of those former slaves who bared their striped backs as proof of the horrors of slavery. Covered with hip-hop hieroglyphics and haunted by the specter of a predictable early death by homicide, Tupac, inverting the formula of the Good Negro, marked his own price into his flesh: the deadly cost of becoming a black man.

See also African Diaspora; Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Feminist Theory and Criticism; Identity and Race in the United States

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marlon b. ross (2005)