Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. By Maurice O. Wallace. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xiv, 236 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223- 2854-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2869-0.)

Abstract

Professor Maurice O. Wallace's Constructing the Black Masculine is a postmodernist interpretation of the construction of black masculinity in memoirs, autobiography, novels, and photography. Having read this book I am glad I am a historian. For most historians, writing is still a matter of both clarity and communication. It is not a display of vocabularistic pyrotechnics in which the use of unpronounceable big words becomes an end in itself. This can be seen in Wallace's discussion of a 1994 cover of a New York Times Magazine depicting the back of a black man's head (p. 20). For example, just what does the following passage mean? From this perspective, the impossibility of a reciprocal gaze to disrupt the machinations of alterity by force of what Kaja Silverman has referred to as “heteropathicidentification” provides the white reader of the magazine the ability to safely and imaginatively explore what he religiously believes is not the self without having to witness what grief, affliction, or rage, such experiments countenance. (p. 32)