SCENES OF TRAUMA: VIOLENT RITES, MIGRATION, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF AFRO ...

200 Pages·2010·0.86 MB·English

SCENES OF TRAUMA: VIOLENT RITES, MIGRATION, AND THE PERFORMANCE
OF AFRO-CARIBBEAN MASCULINITIES

By

CRAIG ADRIAN SMITH

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2010
© 2010 Craig Adrian Smith
To my mother who led by example. You were my first teacher, through your own
adventurous spirit you opened me up to the world, you gave me an appreciation for
knowledge and a desire to see the world, and for that I am eternally grateful
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my committee chair, Leah Rosenberg, for her guidance and
support. I would also like to thank my readers, Mark Reid, Efrain Barradas, and Faye
Harrison members for your encouragement. I also want to thank my mentors Wenying
Xu, and Natalie King-Pedroso for your guidance and support. Finally, I want to thank my
brothers and sisters, my friends, and my colleagues; thank you for your prayers and
encouragement. I could not have done this alone.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... 4
ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................... 7
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 9
2 INITIATION RITES: FROM RUDE BOYS TO REEL BAD MEN ............................... 29
Sweetback’s Revenge: Harder Black Man on Film ................................................... 30
Black Power, Independent Film, and the Black Cowboy........................................... 35
Patriarchy and the Authentic Black Man .................................................................... 42
The Child as Father of Man: Death of the Boy and Birth of the Bad Man ................ 46
Bad(man) Heroes ....................................................................................................... 54
3 A SILENT CRY?: TENTATIVE CRITIQUES OF PATRIARCHAL MASCULINITY
IN BAADASSSSS AND SHOTTAS ............................................................................ 63
Through a Boy’s Eyes ................................................................................................ 66
Silent Resistance ........................................................................................................ 75
Homosocial Erotica and Male Bonding ...................................................................... 78
The Secret to Becoming a Man .................................................................................. 81
Reel Jamaican Rude Bwoys ...................................................................................... 85
Generation Gap .......................................................................................................... 89
Men of the Ghetto ....................................................................................................... 91
Creating Monsters ...................................................................................................... 98
Marrying Men ............................................................................................................ 105
4 ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLIA: MIGRATION AND AFRO-CARIBBEAN
MANHOOD IN CARYL PHILIP’S OEUVRE ............................................................ 108
Not Sadness But Melancholia .................................................................................. 110
States of Mourning and Melancholia........................................................................ 112
Invisible Life .............................................................................................................. 122
Remembering and Reimagining His-story ............................................................... 125
New Land, New Men ................................................................................................ 127
Black Skin, Black Mask ............................................................................................ 134
The Man in the Mirror ............................................................................................... 138
Masquerade and Desire ........................................................................................... 141
Desire Interrupted ..................................................................................................... 145
Homosocial Denial .................................................................................................... 148
5 SIDNEY POITIER: WRITING A NEW SCRIPT FOR BLACK MASCULINITY ....... 152
The Man Who Will Not Be Remembered and the Man Who Will Not Be
Forgotten ............................................................................................................... 158
Rejecting Anger, Demanding Respect, and Reclaiming Manhood Beyond the
Screen.................................................................................................................... 159
Rewriting Black Boyhood.......................................................................................... 167
Patriarchy, Melancholy, and Migration, on the Road to Manhood .......................... 173
The Mind of the Man ................................................................................................. 177
Poitier’s Problem with Women ................................................................................. 181
Black Manhood beyond Measure............................................................................. 184
6 IN CONCLUSION: FAILING AS A MAN, A PROGRESSIVE STRATEGY? .......... 186
LIST OF REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 193
FILMS CITED .................................................................................................................. 199
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.............................................................................................. 200
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

SCENES OF TRAUMA: VIOLENT RITES, MIGRATION, AND THE PERFORMANCE
OF AFRO-CARIBBEAN MASCULINITIES
By
Craig Adrian Smith

August 2010

Chair: Leah Rosenberg
Major: English

Scenes of Trauma: Violent Rites, Migration, and the Performance of Afro-
Caribbean Masculinities is an interdisciplinary project that combines cultural studies,
film, gender, and postcolonial studies to investigate Afro-Caribbean models of
masculinity in film and literature. My project details the ways in which imperialist
phallocentric masculinity is valorized within African American cinema and exported to
the Caribbean where it is mimicked and valorized. Secondly, I am interested in an
analysis of the reverse journey. While Afro-Caribbean men have long been a part of
African American culture and have contributed greatly to the shaping of African
American masculinities, much of the recent work on African American masculinities
studies have tended to flatten out the diversity of men from across the African Diaspora
as simply Black, ignoring the nuances of migration and its effects on the performance of
Blackness and maleness of these subjects within their new locations.
My study introduces Afro-Caribbean masculinity into the scholarly discussion of
African American masculinities started by several African American cultural critics such
as Mark Anthony Neal and bell hooks. Both of these prominent scholars in African
American studies criticize the construction of African American masculinity as presented
in African American culture. They, and others, call for a more progressive Black
masculinity, one that supports Black feminism and fights homophobia. Much of their
critique also applies to Afro-Caribbean culture, which has been strongly influenced by
African American culture in regard to the traumatizing transition between boyhood and
manhood which has great influence on Black males perspectives on feminism and
homophobia. hook’s critique in particular challenges the passive acceptance of “soul
murder” or, in other words, silent acceptance of trauma as rites of passage into
manhood for African American men. I take up hook’s critique in my analysis of the post
independence Afro-Caribbean productions of Black masculinity as they reiterate similar
problematic performances of Black masculinity. I am especially interested in how Afro-
Caribbean performance of masculinity is affected when Black men from the Caribbean
migrate to the metropole, specifically the United States and Britain.
To this end, I juxtapose contemporary representations of Afro-Caribbean
masculinities, produced in the new millennium, with earlier presentations, developed
during the Black Power movement in the 1970s when Black filmmakers and authors
produced images of Black masculinity built on soul murder. I am interested in whether
contemporary productions engage new and progressive forms of Black masculinity or
simply rearticulate conventional representations of Black masculinity that draw on
dominant patriarchal and homophobic modes of gender performance. I suggest that
many of the contemporary Black filmmakers and writers whose work I examine here
remain ambivalent to challenging the phallocentric patriarchal masculinist practices of
traumatic rites of passage for Black boys into manhood; however, there are others who
offer glimpses into what a challenge to that model might look like.
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
My book, it is hoped, will be a mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in which it will be
possible to discern the Negro on the road to disalienation1
Frantz Fanon

In his essay “Caribbean Masculinity at the Fin de Siécle,” Caribbean sociologist
Linden Lewis states that “Culture is never pure but always hybridized; that which we
celebrate as Caribbean culture has long since been borrowed and adapted mainly from
Africa, Asia and Europe, and creatively fashioned within the region”(260). What Lewis
argues here is that the Caribbean is a space where many different cultures collide, and
it is continually affected and influenced by global cultures. In a similar vein, in
“Masculinities in Transition: Gender and the Global Problematique,” Keith Nurse asserts
that “the significant measure of the global gender dynamic is a result of the ‘export of
the European/American gender order to the colonized world’ through institutions like the
church, the military, Western education, the modern state, transnational corporation and
the worldwide media” ( 4). Here Nurse describes what amounts to cultural and gender
imperialism. This sort of gender imperialism has very real effects in the way masculinity
is performed. In his discussion of “Globalization and men’s bodies” from his text The
Men and the Boys, R.W. Connell asserts that “Empire, then, marks a decisive historical
change in the social embodiment of masculinities. Under imperialism men’s bodies are
shifted around the world, trained and controlled in new ways, sorted and symbolized on
different principles”(62). These discussions note a decidedly one-sided and oppressive
flow of constructs of gender—one that Toni Cade argues has us “so turned around

1 In the Richard Philcox translation, Negro is actually translated as “black man,” and indeed for Fanon
“[t]he black is a black man” (italics mine, 8). All references to Black Skin White Masks are taken from the
Charles Lam Markmann translation.
about Western models [of gender roles], we don’t even know how to raise the correct
questions. But raise them we must if we are to fashion a natural sense of self, if we are
to develop harmonious relationships with each other” (105).
While I do agree with Lewis, Nurse, and Connell’s assessments of the imperialist
nature of Western religious, political, and economic influences on the performance of
gender roles globally, it is important to acknowledge that this is not a one way street.
Lewis notes that the Caribbean is a hybrid space but does not seem to account for the
agency of this position. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha, however, explains
that hybridity “unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial
power…reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of
the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (160). As Western constructs of gender
roles inundate postcolonial and colonized spaces like the Caribbean, Caribbean
constructs of gender roles also infiltrate the West. In his seminal work The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy makes the related argument
that “the cultures of this group [Britain’s black citizens] have been produced in a
syncretic pattern in which the styles and forms of the Caribbean, the United States, and
Africa have been reworked and reinscribed in the novel context of modern Britain’s own
untidy ensemble of regional and class-oriented conflicts” (3). Popular culture, including
music, films, literature, and dance, travels across the Black Atlantic influencing and
being influenced by the people who consume them. Through continuous exchange of
cultural ideas and gender performances that have existed since Africans were
kidnapped and carried to the New World, Blacks undoubtedly continue to have intra-
diasporic exchange and dialogue. The performance of Black gender and sexuality then