Project MUSE: Callaloo

Herman Gray - Black Masculinity and Visual Culture - Callaloo 18:2 Callaloo 18.2 (1995) 401-405 BLACK MASCULINITY AND VISUAL CULTURE* by Herman Gray I want to inquire into the social circumstances and cultural conditions in which contemporary representations of black masculinity are produced and circulate. Recognizing the dense inter textual nature of electronic visual media, my aim is to unsettle as much as possible the formal and largely constructed ways in which we see and understand visual representations of black masculinity. Much as one might experience them daily through ads, music television, television situation comedy, and sports, my desire is for this text, in effect if not in structure, to approximate the dense and relentless but always rich and increasingly inseparable experience of visual representations of black masculinity. Self representations of black masculinity in the United States are historically structured by and against dominant (and dominating) discourses of masculinity and race, specifically (whiteness). For example, the black jazz men of the 1950s and 1960s, notably Miles Davis and John Coltrane, are particularly emblematic of the complex social relations (race, class, sexual) and cultural politics surrounding the self-construction and representation of the black masculine in the public sphere. As modern innovators in musical aesthetics, cultural vision, and personal style, these men challenged dominant cultural assumptions...
Source: Project Muse