Golden: How have contemporary black artists navigated the constructions of black masculine identities in the quest for authenticity?

Julien: Isaac Julien’s “Looking for Langston” embodies the search for a sense of “place” for the black gay male in a heterosexist and racist world.

Mercer: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a photographer by trade, uses the black male body in his work as the incarnation of an entre-deux, a living intersection.

After reading the first few sentences of Thelma Golden’s piece “My Brother”, I immediately thought of an exhibition I saw in DC of Hank Willis Thomas’s work, an artist we’ve encountered before in this course. In the series “Branded”, Thomas explicitly confronts contemporary black masculinity and its construction by (white) America. The piece that most struck me from this collection, Branded Head, is a lightjet print from 2003 (pictured below).

Also in this series is the equally stunning (and discomfiting) Basketball and Chain, another lightjet print from the same year.

Both images, which can be found at Thomas’s site under “2011 – Branded”, speak to the continued white ownership, in some sense, of black masculinity. Here, Thomas uses the example of professional basketball and Nike’s (here, literal) branding tactics to make apparent the trap of contemporary black masculinity, which according to the artist seems to be a modern reconstruction of slavery. Ownership, of one’s own body and of masculinity and representation, is especially pertinent here and in the works of the other artists named by Golden, as they seek to navigate the loaded subject of the black male. These artists must, in a sense, unshackle the black masculine in order to find a liberating authenticity.

In the same vein, I’d like to challenge Golden’s claim that “hip-hop culture has become the signifier of black male heterosexuality”. Golden is right to claim that hip-hop/rap have become sites of the demonstration of “fitness” as a (heterosexual!) black male, but I do not think that this territory is so flat. Not only do queer black rappers/hip-hop artists exist, but does the overwhelmingly heterosexual music of the mainstream necessarily conform to heterosexual ideals? I think this is a claim that can be played with and disproved, especially with an examination of “acceptable” white (hetero)sexuality and the “other” sexuality. In the meantime, I’d love to share some up-and-coming queer rappers with my classmates and followers of the blog. Please recall, however, that while these artists are in a way “pioneers”, as the article claims, they are in no way the ONLY queer hip-hop artists/rappers and they are certainly not the first ones. Just thought this would be an interesting read with regards to the overwhelming heterosexism inherent to constructions of black masculinity and gender!