Dismantling Southern Codes of Black Masculinity : The Black Male’s Demystified Image in Hal Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places (1970)

Abstract

Meaning, as Greimas puts it, is nothing but the possibility of interpreting and transcoding. Applying intersectionality theory, it will be argued that there are two antagonistic images of black men in Hal Bennett’s representation of black masculinity, one as the provocative black stud and one as the submissive assimilationist black man, both as a product of myths. My contention in this essay is that the power of metaphors and the focus on the rhetoric of exaggeration can be seen as the invention of a new language to dismantle the uniform discourse of black masculinity, deconstruct the stereotypes of the black man as rapist, inscribe the visibility of the black masculine body, and outline new forms of masculinity in which African American manhood and womanhood are inextricably linked when capturing the idea that discussing one’s body helps define oneself.

Keywords

• black masculinity
• race
• gender
• violence
• sexuality
• masculine body