Black Men, Black Feminism by Jared Sexton

Author:Jared Sexton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

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If black men cannot expect black women to instruct them in their critical engagement with the project of black feminism—surely because the latter bear no obligation to do so, but also because the ethical demands of black feminism are an ongoing and evolving challenge for them too—then it stands to reason that black men will have to venture something unknown, and at their own risk, in order to forge a response without a prescription. Poet and literary critic David Marriott is, not unlike Ellis, among those attempting to pursue the task at hand and his example provides a sort of counterpoint, or supplement, to the discourse of progressive black masculinities. In his extraordinary text, On Black Men (2000), he asks this pointed and poignant question: “what value do black men themselves possess as free black men” (xiv)? Pointed because we rarely find in academic writing a language so shorn of equivocation and ornament, returning us to the most basic order of questioning and deriving its complexity from there. Poignant because it arouses in the reader inchoate feelings of overwhelming magnitude, a level of half-formed excitation and enervation not easily bound to discourse. The question may turn out to be strictly unanswerable, or perhaps incalculable. Upon reading this question, and pondering it appropriately, one might be moved to inarticulate rage or grief or tears, perhaps to hysterical laughter. One might even close the book or burn it or bury it. Worse, one might make recourse to the defense of trivialization or familiarization. One might say that there is little new here that we have not already heard ad nauseam. In any case, one cannot help but restage the “vicious pantomime of unvarying reification and compulsive fascination” that characterizes the haunted lives of black men, across the multitude; repeating the demand that black men “become interchangeable with the uncanny, deeply unsettling, projections of culture” (Marriott 2000, xiv).27

Marriott does not deploy the phrase “deeply unsettling” here as a term of moral denunciation. Rather, drawing from and elaborating upon the singular work of Frantz Fanon , he uses it to describe a profound psychic, which is also to say somatic or bodily, disorientation attendant to the formulation, ascription, and inhabitation of racial blackness in the historic instance. This disorientation, a permanently unsettled state, plays out in lived experience with significant internal differentiation. In the current theoretical environs, we might say that it is shaped importantly, sometimes crucially, by a matrix of social processes of class division, color distinction, regional specification, and gender and sexual variance. Always importantly, sometimes crucially, for we are also addressing the scale, or moment, at which, as Wahneema Lubiano (2005) has it, “the complexities are covered by the shadow cast by the people so multiply black.” The relation of tension between these scales and moments enveloped in shadow lies at the heart of any attempt to comment upon, let alone study, the lives of black men and boys, however the parameters are set. For not only must one offer an

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