My first source, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” looks at how black artists, from musicians to movie stars, work to reinvent black manhood under white supremacy. It also touches on intersections between race and sexuality, and looks at how black masculinity has constructed itself against femininity. I want to look deeper into the visualization of black masculinity by engaging with the article, “Bodies That Were Not Ours: Black Performers, Black Performance,” which claims that the black community has experienced trauma from seeing the black male body subjected to pain. Here I can discuss the violence of the situation videos along with the representation of the black body in the art centerfold.
My next source is more of a personal article, “Black Masculinity” by C.P. Gause which looks at the trope of the angry black man and how black masculinity has exploded in popular culture in recent years. The article describes the newfound fascination with black masculinity as “the figure of the menacing black male is the object of adolescent intrigue, fascination, and commodification” (Gause 44). Gause also goes on to compare the development of black masculinity to white masculinity, something that the three sections of citizen do as well. I’d like to get into conversation with Gause his argument for a new masculinity and how to achieve it – he believes black men can change the aggressive masculinity they have adopted through spiritual and emotional awakening, but I would argue along with the other critics, that this will be almost impossible to achieve while under violent white patriarchy.
I want to include some ideas from a book by bell hooks, which looks directly at how black masculinity and violence are intertwined. hooks claims “all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent” (hooks 46). hooks argues that black men are conditioned to be violent both by the white racist patriarchy, and by black anti-racists, who believe violence is the only way black men can earn their equality. I’d like to examine this idea very closely in respect to the art I’m analyzing, since many of the photos of black men are split in half and the situation videos create a split narrative between how the white community looks at black violence and how the black community views it.
Hopefully I can incorporate more sources than this into my final paper, but these three sources will probably be my base. Common threads appear to be how black men construct a sense of masculinity for themselves when white masculinity is seen as the norm, and how media and the society at large reacts to this type of masculinity. Rough thesis: Rankine is presenting the violence born out of black masculinity as justified, since white violence is protected by the state and black men cannot fight against white supremacy in any other way, which authors on black masculinity have mixed opinions about.
Works Cited
Fusco, C..”The Bodies That Were Not Ours: Black Performers, Black Performance.”Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 5.1 (1996): 28-33. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Gause, C. P. “Chapter 2: BLACK MASCULINITY.” Counterpoints 337 (2008): 37–59. Print.
Gray, Herman. “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture.” Callaloo 18.2 (1995): 401–405. Print.
hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2003: 43-60. Print.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014. Print.
