Becoming the black subject: Violence, domesticity and the masculine self in mid-20th century African American literature

In "Becoming the Black Subject: Violence, Domesticity and the Masculine Self in Mid-20th Century African American Literature," I examine the roles of violence and domesticity in achieving selfhood in African-American literature from 1940-80. A number of significant changes and developments occurred within and around black communities during this period, including increasing urbanization due to the Great Migration, African and Asian decolonization struggles, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, rapid expansion of the black middle class, the War on Poverty and black women's response to/engagement with feminism. These developments, I argue, necessitated revisiting the idea of blackness, what being a black man in America meant, how black identity was produced (or not). In black authors' answers to these questions, violence and domesticity repeatedly emerge as central concerns.; The project is divided into two parts. In the first chapter, I sketch an interpretive history, so to speak, of the discourses of violence and domesticity as they relate to black individuals and communities. I suggest that there must be something more than real world conditions or circumstances to account for the primacy of the narrative of the endangered black male and the persistence of the image of the matriarchal, pathological black family. In the second part, Chapters Two through Four, I turn to the work of Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin. When violence occurs in earlier African-American literature, black characters are usually the victims of whites. The vulnerability of black bodies and homes to abuse, penetration and destruction signals blacks' status as less than human. Achieving selfhood requires, in part, preventing (sometimes through violence) violent, unwanted access to one's body and home. Bigger Thomas represents a radical departure from this model, and so I start with Richard Wright's Native Son, examining the implications and limitations of Bigger's model, which not only posits violence, but also rejects black domesticity as a means of achieving selfhood. Wright's success made him the preeminent figure in African-American literature for several decades, and in my final two chapters I examine the works of two of his contemporaries---Chester Himes and James Baldwin---as they reject, revise and/or attempt to move beyond Bigger as a model of self-formation. Himes rejects Bigger's violence but not violence itself; I read his detective series as attempting to manage violence and sexuality such that a stable black domesticity becomes possible. Sexuality is also a major issue for Baldwin, the most vocal critic of the violence in Wright's work. Father-son, fraternal or other male ties are important, but Baldwin's domestic spaces are not necessarily heterosexual or monoracial. I read Baldwin's novels and essays as working to recuperate a specific type of violence in the construction of black, heterosexual domesticity while at the same time rejecting black nationalists' efforts to couple blackness with heterosexuality.