Searching for the New Black Man—From Ideal to Progressive Black Masculinities in African American Literature

Searching for the New Black Man:  Black Masculinity and Women’s Bodies evolved out of my need to better understand the roles women play in the lives, identities, ideas, and writings of black men.  As both an undergraduate and graduate scholar, I recognized that many of the experiences I was having with the black men around me—from my father and black male friends to potential love interests—were echoed in the literature I was reading.  It quickly became clear to me that the tensions, conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings that seemed inherent in intraracial relations between black men and women had a history and context.  Representations of relationships between black men and women in the literature helped me to understand how the hegemonic forces of racism, sexism, and homophobia could deform and pathologize black intraracial relations.  Moreover, in many cases the oppositional relationships represented in the literature were echoed in the scholarship and critical debates in which some black men and women disparaged each other’s work in the name of arguing, for example, the Afrocentric aims of the Black Aesthetic versus poststructuralist elitism or masculinist versus feminist (or womanist) ideals.

Searching for the New Black Man began as an attempt to think through representations of (black) women in the literature of black men.  However, as the project progressed several fundamental questions drove the analysis:  How are women’s bodies functioning within constructions of ideal masculinity; What are the costs not only to black men but black communities of adhering to ideals originating in white, heteronormative, patriarchal masculinity; And are there black men and women who work as allies in the coterminous struggles against capitalist patriarchy, racism, sexism, and homophobia?  These questions lead me to the work of black female/male feminists such as Michael Awkward, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gary Lemons, Patricia Hill Collins, Mark Anthony Neal, Athena Mutua, and David Ikard.

Thus, Searching for the New Black Man not only contextualizes and interrogates formations of ideal black manhood across the historical terrain provided by the African American male literary tradition—from slave narratives to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright’s Native Son, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumber, Always Outgunned and Walkin’ the Dog— but also develops a collaboratively gendered methodology to elucidate texts that challenge hegemonic masculinities.  Using representations of women as “barometers” (a conception articulated by Jeffrey Leak), Athena Mutua’s articulations of progressive black masculinities, and Mark Anthony Neal’s conceptions of the “NewBlackMan,” my work points up literary identities that privilege new ways of performing black masculinities.  These progressive identities draw not only on masculine ideals, but the insights and critiques of black feminism to reimagine how powerful and liberatory black masculinities can be constructed and performed in the twenty-first century.

The book culminates with an analysis of the quintessential example of this—and the extent to which literary narratives can shape “real” life choices and identities—in the production and dissemination of Barack Obama’s brand of black male feminist masculinity.  His public literary campaign for elective office began with his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and culminated with his successful election to the presidency of the United States.  I argue that Barack Obama’s performance of a progressive, black male feminist sensibility funded his ability to craft a black masculinity both black and white voters could be comfortable with.  Consequently, paralleling the ways in which W.E.B. Du Bois served as the quintessential model of black middle-class masculinist identity for the twentieth century—and the triumphs, interventions, contradictions, pathologies, silences, and contestations inherent within this (which I discuss in Chapter Two)—Barack Obama’s progressive, black male feminist constructions of masculinity set the terms for a whole new century of expressions of powerful black masculine identities.