| This dissertation opens new avenues for critical investigations into the coterminous ideologies of race and gender in identity construction by analyzing the specificity of its production in texts written by African American men. The main objective of these texts is to challenge racial domination; however, in the pursuit of this goal, these writers represent the struggle for agency and racial equality primarily within patriarchal terms. Not only are the particularities of African American women's struggles for identity overlooked, but more important, within these texts the bodies of African American women become the silenced, conquered frontier upon which counter-hegemonic art and identity---indeed, expressivity itself---can be successfully produced. In this way, these male writers end up replicating the very oppressive structures they seek to challenge.;My dissertation will analyze this persistent phenomenon in African American male writing and will include Henry Bibb's The Slave Narrative of Henry Bibb (1849), W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1908), Darkwater (1920), and Dark Princess (1928), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), James Baldwin's Another Country (1960), and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage , (1990). Much has already been written on the history of African American male/female relations. Such writers as Barbara Christian, Barbara Johnson, Deborah McDowell, Trudier Harris, and Hazel Carby have addressed the ways in which African American women have been represented in the literature and political writings of black men and white mainstream culture. However, my analysis differs from most of these in that I interrogate the ways in which certain racist/sexist constructions of black identity are rhetorically and structurally reinscribed in the very texts that seek to challenge them. I do this by employing specific theoretical praxes---feminism, deconstruction, and cultural materialism. I use these modes of analysis to investigate what exactly the inscription of particular representations of African American women in this literature enables and silences culturally and politically. |
