Self reflection(s): Subjectivity and racial subordination in the contemporary African‐American writer

Abstract

Abstract Shelby Steele's The Content of our Character, and John Wideman's Philadelphia Fire are contrasted for what they reveal about the two authors’ confrontation with self‐expression and self‐definition in a society that denies African‐American individuality. I argue that Steele's and Wideman's distinctive solutions to personal expression as demonstrated in these works constitute the discursive boundaries, the poles between which black male subjectivity oscillates in this racialist society. To explicate these particular positions, I draw on psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, masculinity, and subjectivity. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is invoked to articulate, albeit in a different society and context, the subjective crisis of the intellectual, the linkage between one's inner world and outer society, and the relation between personal identity and national self‐understanding. While Steele opts for an isolated, transcendent individualism, Wideman embraces a conception of self inextricably connected t...