Black Masculinity and Visual Culture

Abstract

I want to inquire into the social circumstances and cultural conditions in which contemporary representations of black masculinity are produced and circulate. Recognizing the dense intertextual nature of electronic visual media, my aim is to unsettle as much as possible the formal and largely constructed ways in which we see and understand visual representations of black masculinity. Much as one might experience them daily through ads, music television, television situation comedy, and sports, my desire is for this text, in effect if not in structure, to approximate the dense and relentless but always rich and increasingly inseparable experience of visual representations of black masculinity. Self representations of black masculinity in the United States are historically structured by and against dominant (and dominating) discourses of masculinity and race, specifically (whiteness).' For example, the black jazz men of the 1950s and 1960s, notably Miles Davis and John Coltrane, are particularly emblematic of the complex social relations (race, class, sexual) and cultural politics surrounding the self-con- struction and representation of the black masculine in the public sphere.2 As innovators in musical aesthetics, cultural vision, and personal style, these men challenged dominant cultural assumptions about masculinity and whiteness. And it was through their music and style that these (largely heterosexual black men) defined themselves in a racist social order. For many of us, jazz men articulated a way of knowing ourselves and seeing the world through the very struc- tures of feeling they assumed, articulated, and enacted-from the defiantly cool pose and fine vines of Miles to the black and third world internationalism that framed the ceaseless spiritual and musical quest of Coltrane. Davis and Coltrane, like their contemporaries, enacted a black masculine that not only challenged whiteness but exiled it to the (cultural) margins of blackness-i.e., in their hands blackness was a powerful symbol of the masculine.3 This figure of the black jazz man was not without contradictions. As a different sign of the masculine he was policed as much as he was celebrated and exoticized by white men and women alike. Policed as a social threat because he transgressed the social role assigned to him by the dominant culture and celebrated as the modern primitive because he embodied and expressed a masculinity that explicitly rejected the reigning codes of propriety and place. Drugs, sexism, pleasure, excess, nihilism, defiance, pride, and the cool pose of disengagement were all a part of the style,