Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin's Primer of Black American Masculinity

Abstract

t has become commonplace to suggest the similarities in the histories of the black and feminist consciousness movements of the 1960s and '70s, especially the critical blindnesses that threatened to undermine the very solidarity crucial to political identity.1 The conspicuous elision of women from black nationalism's struggle to achieve political recognition for its people was matched by feminism's inability to countenance the interests of ethnic women in its vision of cultural renovation. Just as the Black Panthers lorded it over their women, middle-class white feminists failed to recognize the different needs of women of color-especially Black women-who served in their very households as domestic help. Although leading white feminists might have entertained the political possibilities of a gender-based alliance between white women and women of color, insofar as they understood black female activism as part of the broader struggle for racial liberation, they tacitly committed black women to a marginal role in an essentially masculinist enterprise. While ostensibly struggling against racial oppression, black nationalism cultivated an overt sexism; meanwhile feminism, in its battle with gender oppression, perpetuated an indifferent racism. Indeed, if all the men were black, then all the women were white.2 How interesting, then, that James Baldwin's voice has been both silenced and lost-silenced by the sexual politics of an emergent black left, lost because critics like Irving Howe decried Baldwin's putative aestheticism in favor of Richard Wright's militancy. But from our perspective, Baldwin's is a voice ahead of its time, one that explicitly addresses the implication of race and gender and, even more, attempts to articulate a ethic well before gay entered common parlance and certainly before the work of writers and scholars like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Michael Lynch, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman legitimated queer theory as a critical discourse. Baldwin's position is especially interesting because he synthesizes race and consciousness during some of the most politically volatile decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, Baldwin's career strongly suggests the influence of feminism on his aesthetic, the insights of which he subsequently recontextualized in the struggle for black liberation. African American literature from approximately 1940 to the mid-1970s was primarily a masculinist enterprise dominated by Richard Wright's protest novel and Ralph Ellison's literary pluralism. Along with Alice Walker's re-discovery of Zora Neale Hurston and the pastoral tradition, the last two decades have witnessed an explosion of writing by black women and the recuperation of a black female literary history that dramatizes a specifical