Conclusion

Masculine Legacies

From the ambivalence of nationalist sympathizers to the incisive suspicions of outliers, the Black Power movement's equation of masculinity and nationalist insurgency generated a broad spectrum of dissident responses. In reconstructing these cleavages, I have argued that we must reconsider the existing critical and historical frames employed to construct the period as an object of knowledge. Nationalists referenced masculinity not only as a means to subordinate women but also as a mechanism to consolidate the speculary strategies of interpellation that they mobilized against white American nationalism. And it is precisely the unevenness, contradiction, and anxiety attending these strategies that male fiction writers elaborated with such acuity. Their work recommends a reconstruction of what Paula Giddings has termed the "Masculine Decade" as one defined by its ideological contests and the often tenuous pursuit of racial solidarity. Such revisionism requires attending to the multiple ways that contemporary criticism and cultural history have worked in concert to obscure the profound instability that orbited about the politicization of masculinity. Moreover, the book's trafficking between the exigencies of the present and the political dictates of the past is especially consequential for both assessing the ongoing evolution of African American discourse about gender and troubling extant assumptions regarding the status of identity critique

as a mode of intervention.

The ongoing influence of the Black Power era's fraught recourse to masculinity was evidenced starkly in the public furor over the 1995 Million Man March. This landmark event underscored the persistence of mas-culinist ideologies in national political agendas and the familiarity of the critiques that emerged to negate the platform. Essential to the divide were the Nation of Islam and Maulana Karenga, parties instrumental in crafting the masculine logics that pervaded the nationalism of the Black Power era. They crafted the march's official mission statement, issuing a "priority call to Black men to stand up and assume" a "new and expanded sense of responsibility," one grounded in "the realization that the strength and resourcefulness of the family and the liberation of the people require it."1 While the mission statement tempers this masculinist focus with the caveat that the organizers were not "denying or minimizing the equal

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rights and ivs|)onsil)ilit) <>i Blacl women,H theii argument that male au thorny was (he central engine <>l < ommunal politics effectively trumps the gesture toward gendei equity.8 And ii one accepts that the conveners sincerely did not intend to marginalize women, then it is even more troubling that they did not perceive the contradiction between their advocacy of parity between the sexes and their overwhelmingly patriarchal logic. Responding to these formulations with the inevitability of the dialectic, critics such as Adolph Reed, Michelle Wallace, and Kristal Brent Zook took exception to the march's presumptuous marginalization of black women and its "assertion of male priority in families and communities."3 In many respects, then, the debate about the march's platform restaged the very contestations about gender parity that were a definitive feature < >1 the Black Power era. The cynical reading of this repetition is that, after two decades, the public dialogue about masculinist politics had not evolved appreciably. Of course these commentators did make crucial interven-tions at a time when the march's conveners put forth one of the most aggressively patriarchal black platforms since the Black Power era. Still, there is a way in which the debate about the privileging and exclusion of particular black subjects binds these commentaries to a dialectic that has already been scripted.

A more generous reading of the Million Man March controversy might note that these debates did not break down as a sharp divide between disgruntled women and the male advocates of masculinist politics. Commentators such as Reed, A. Leon Higginbotham, and Luke Charles Harris were at the forefront of challenges to the march's masculinist focus.4 Thus the presence of critiques issued from either side of the gender divide c hallenges bell hooks's unqualified 1992 claim that "[b]lack female critiques of black male phallocentrism and sexism have had little impact on black male consciousness."5 While the influence of feminism may not be as widespread as some might like, the clarity with which male commentators took exception to the march's masculinist formulations reveals a much more substantial engagement with feminism by black men than I looks acknowledges. Moreover, within the admittedly small world of literary and cultural studies, the writings of black feminists have had a profound impact on the work of such eminent scholars as Michael Awkward and Henry Louis Gates Jr.6 And further complicating the entrenched oppo-sition between feminism and nationalism were critical analyses of how the march's patriarchal emphasis intersects with a concomitant exclusion of gay subjects from the black body politic.7 Robert Reid-Pharr captures this second ordei ol c\< lusion eloquently when he asserts, "[I]f the real message ol the mart h was thai ii Is going to take a heroic black masculinity to restore ordei to various communities, especially poor and working class communities, then it follows thai blacl gay men are ii relevant

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or even dangerous i<> that projc< i. Spike I ,ee\s film (let on the Bus (1996) stages (his conflict provocatively as it follows a gTOUp oi black men who journey to the march and in the process grapple with the social divisions of the group. An animating tension among the travelers is the presence of a gay male character who insists that his sexuality neither emasculates him nor bars him from full participation in black political life. Especially encouraging about the march, then, was the subtle breaching of nationalist dichotomies ushered in by male dissenters who challenged mascu-linist orthodoxy.

Absent from these debates, nevertheless, was a more robust elaboration of how the recourse to a traditional gender economy served the broader interpellate ends of the event. For instance, one effect of the exclusion of women from the march was to allow the marchers to forget the fundamental political incoherence of the gathering. It was Farrakhan himself who adopted this problematic stance: "We must belong to some organization that is working for, and in the interests of, the uplift and the liberation of our people. Go back, join the NAACP if you want to. Join the Urban League. Join the All-African Revolutionary Party. Join us: join the Nation of Islam. Join PUSH. Join the Congress of Racial Equality."9 To argue that black Americans could best express their political will by joining any black organization whatsoever was to insist that the march had no political agenda in a conventional sense. That is, if all stances are politically valid—no matter how contradictory their ends might be—then the content of Farrakhan's platform is fundamentally incoherent. Thus the widespread sense that there was no political platform to galvanize black Americans during the 1990s was only mitigated by the marchers' tautological position that they were all indeed black men supporting the redemptive reconstitution of black masculinity. The negation of the female political subject consequentially underwrote an agenda that made its appeal intelligible by affirming the shibboleths of bourgeois masculinity— that we are all men, that we all have families, that we would all like to be better and more responsible in fulfilling these roles. The effect of issuing such a summons was to suspend for a moment the multiple lines of ideological division among the marchers themselves as well as between the marchers and the man who addressed them.

If the Million Man March serves as a particularly visible reminder of the persistence with which the divides of the Black Power era continue to exert pressure on political discourse in our own time, the schisms of the past have been equally influential in contemporary literary culture. Genealogies tracking the emergence of black feminist literary and critical traditions have been particularly instrumental in reproducing a divide that is a byproduct of the Black Power era's gender politics. Criticism by Barbara Christian, Madhu Dubey, and Calvin Hernton argues persuasively

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thai In some measure ;i l>la< I feminist consciousness emerged as a re spouse to the mascnlinisl excesses o! ttlack Power advocates. Christian captures this sentiment when she lestilies that, in part, her own feminism emerged "because I had experienced . . . much antifemale black cultural nationalist rhetoric."10 Hernton articulates a more blunt version of this narrative in his assertion that "the macho philosophy of the Black Power Black Arts Movement resulted in so many demeaning experiences for the women that many of them began to protest and eventually break away."11 And though Dubey takes care to avoid the suggestion that "[bjlack women's novels of the 1970s . . . simply oppose contemporary nationalist discourse on black identity," her argument that "black women's fiction written during the seventies resolutely resists the tendency to naturalize the revolutionary black subject" affirms the binary that she seeks to circumvent.12 While I am persuaded that the critique of the Black Power movement's privileging of masculine identity was influential in shaping black feminism, critics have not been able to examine the movement's divisive gender ideologies without reproducing those very divides. By demonstrating that movement ideologues such as Baldwin, Major, and Killens were among the first to articulate the shortfalls of the movement's mas-culinist ideologies, I posit in this book one way to complicate the political oppositions that the movement generated. If these writers shifted and countered ideological stances that they had once endorsed, we can no longer posit Black Power ideology as the coherent totality against which feminism defined itself.

No less crucial to understanding the ongoing reverberations of Black Power ideology are the rancorous debates concerning the representation of black men in the works of black women authors. From the late 1980s forward, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones were taken to task by male critics who were disturbed by what they interpreted as the women's degrading literary representations of black men. Mel Watkins's description of male responses to Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enufaptly expresses the tenor of the charge: "Their complaint, put simply, was that the play in its consistent and unwavering denigration of black men presented an unbalanced, simplified portrait that was consequently not only exaggerated and false but that also undermined the black man's struggle for acceptance in mainstream society."13 Watkins, Ishmael Reed, Philip Royster, and others voiced their concern that black women were complicit in a culture that was all too comfortable with dehumanizing depictions of black men. Like Black Power advocates, these critics argued that crafting the appropriate ideological representation of black men could impede or promote emancipatory social change. At its most extreme, this argument evolved into a paranoid conspiracy theory in which black women collude with the

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dominant culture against black men. Reed articulates ihis view su< < m< tly: "As a black man, I feel that I am being stalked. Stalked by while directors, scriptwriters, and producers who are using properties by black women in order to carry on a vindictive campaign against black men. . . . [T]hese guys are turning gifted literary projects by black women into propaganda pieces against black men."14 Such commentaries were duly taken to task by Deborah McDowell, who argues that while "black women writers have made black women the subjects of their own family stories, these male readers/critics are attempting to usurp that place for themselves and place it at the center of critical inquiry."15 Nearly a decade after the decline of Black Power, our literary culture continued to reproduce a discourse about gender in which the opposing parties emphasized most acutely the primacy of masculine self-fashioning and the lamentable exclusion of the female subject. Even in McDowell's otherwise disciplined analysis, there is little reflection on how this debate recapitulates the dialectics of Black Power.

A principle factor enabling the reproduction of the divide between feminists and masculinist ideologues is their shared preoccupation with identity as the core element of their critical and political practice. Watkins's argument that "denigrating" fictional representations of black men effectively impede black male social progress necessarily infers that a more acceptable set of representations would foster progressive mobility for these men. Similarly, McDowell's response to the masculinist focus of male literary critics hinges on its own investment in identity as a foundation for politics. Her argument that black women writers' signal achievement is their foregrounding of black female subjectivity serves as an ironic inversion of the nationalist privileging of masculine identity. The binding issue in this debate is thus not the opposition between masculine identity and the representation of black women's identities as "dynamic, ever-changing historically and spatially situated," but rather that both discourses position gendered subjectivity as the central index of progressive literary and political endeavor.16 While this jostling over the appropriate representation of black subjectivity has been a defining feature of black criticism, in the foregoing chapters I have argued that the dissident voices of male writers ask us to articulate a mode of analysis that moves beyond the impasse in which commentators take the affirmation of particular subject positions as their primary charge. Indeed, it was one of the best-known feminist critics of Black Power nationalism who suggested that the capacity to dissent from the movement's growing masculinist focus need not be limited by the gender of the dissident. In a seldom examined passage from her autobiography, Angela Davis takes the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Liberation Front to task for their support of "male supremacist trends" that were "winding their way through

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the movement," yet at th< ian* tin* ih< acknowledges that it was her male colleagues "Franklin .m<i Frank91 who "natuially, fought on our side."1' i \< M .is .i feminist combating the movement's gender inequality on the ground, Davis was able i<> disarticulate the political problem from the affirmation oi a particular subject position. And she understood well that her male counterparts might adopt a position that worked against the < < msolichit ion of a masculinist political platform. It may be this capacity for a cleaving between one's own subjectivity and the political exigencies (>l mass politics that Davis unwittingly shared with many of the male writers in this study. Attending to such moments of fugitive alliance offers one way to break with the Manichean impulses that are both the legacy and the misrepresentation of the Black Power era.

In arguing that parity exists between the affirmation of gendered subject ivi ties within black nationalism and contemporary feminism, my argument certainly bears a resemblance to broader critiques of identity politics circulating in the contemporary academy. As an edition of New Literary History puts it, "Around 1990, after a decade of groundbreaking work on race, class, and gender, a number of influential critics turned a skeptical eye toward identity."18 With respect to racial politics, scholars such as Stuart Hall, Hortense Spillers, and Paul Gilroy have made powerful arguments to suggest that one can no longer posit an absolutist conception of racial belonging. Writing in the early 1990s, Spillers announced that the "apparent homogeneity of the mass which black life offered to the imagination of the sixties . . . has come unraveled at the seams."19 And, similarly, Hall makes the case that essentialist conceptions of black masculinity were only "being put into question by black women and black gay men" in the early 1990s.20 These genealogies, while correctly histori-cizing postidentity as a term with cultural currency, overstate the sense in which the skepticism concerning nationalist identity politics is exclusively a product of present political sensibilities. And while scholars such as Wendy Brown and Grant Farred have worked to trace identity politics to its origins in the counterculture movements of the sixties, they have not attended adequately to the robust dissent about this political turn within these movements.21

Moreover, briefs against identity like those by Walter Benn Michaels have been no more attentive to the nuances of contests about identity within the counterculture. A crucial argument of Michaels's recent work The Shape of the Signifier is that the late 1960s was the inaugural moment for a contemporary political environment in which identity has effectively usurped Cold War instantiations of ideology. Following the work of Francis Fukayama, Michaels submits that the Cold War produced a version of ideology in which the commitment to capitalism or communism entailed a fundamentally universalist gesture because "the question as to which of

two social systems is better is intrinsically universal: ih<- belief thai pi ivatc ownership of property is unjust has no particular geographical location; to prefer communism or capitalism is to prefer it everywhere for everyone."22 Such universalism is set against the post-1960s climate in which the primacy of identity makes substantive disagreement impossible; because of the contemporary commitment to the subject, political claims routinely hinge not on a universal claim but on the distinctions between subjects with different perspectives—on the differences between you and me. In some sense Michaels makes an argument that seems to accurately describe the troublesome contemporary debates between feminists and black male critics. Nevertheless, his argument that the rise of identity is equivalent to the end of disagreement is misleading. The intriguing thing about the Black Power era is that the moment when identity came to the foreground of politics was precisely when writers began to vigorously question the wisdom of the identitarian turn. The very possibility of such skepticism was in fact bound up in both the assertion of identity as the definitive element of nationalism and the uncertainties that this tactic produced. And whether in Baldwin's evocation of the writer as skeptic, Wideman's focus on meditative reflexivity, or Major's self-conscious rejection of nationalism, their work demonstrates that substantive disagreement constituted a founding moment in the contemporary turn to identity. If scholars wish to elaborate the genealogies of identity with greater precision, they would do well to begin anew with the very social movements that have been frequently disavowed but seldom appreciated for their nuanced complexity.