The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.
bystanders towards the forces of law and order highlighted the strong semantic connections between black masculinity, street vending, urban decay, criminality and anti-immigration beliefs about being swamped such that, in order to insult the refugees, it was enough simply to accuse them of setting up their own market. Their worldly belongings came to symbolise the wares laid out on the pavement by other West African street vendors, and all the tensions around economic entitlement and use of public space associated with those activities. Describing the group as guappi
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
) supervisor, MCSC members negate those norms on the weekends at cricket matches. They aim to enjoy themselves, abandon oppressive rules and be with people like them. They use the cricket grounds as a venue in which to relax. For them, drinking is an essential component of relaxing and performing black masculinity. Warlie, exasperated, walked away from the field as fighting erupted among his black and Indian team members. I followed him
with the ‘Negro’ – a contradictory fantasmatic figure of phallic jouissance, the punishing superego, and the punished victim delegated to take the blame for woman’s theft of the phallus. Paradoxically, in order to function as a defence mechanism, the masquerade of womanliness has to be reinforced by another masculine identification – but this time not with the insignia of white power but with the racist stereotype of black masculinity. In this contradictory identification with the punished victim/punishing superego, we see here a feminised figure of Negrophobia, 58
’s astonishing pronouncement called to mind the idea of the shotgun wedding, a historic term used to describe a marriage that comes about because the bride has fallen pregnant. First, the image of the rifle evoked the idea of feminine honour that had been brought into question by improper sexual relations between men and women outside marriage. Second, the rifle evoked a colonial image, redolent with ideas of safari and big-game hunting, that painted black masculinity as over-sexualised, irrational and dangerous to Neapolitan female honour. This connection had not occurred to
joking practices of transcultural masculine solidarity against the police as an infrapolitical talk, which both subverted and reinforced hegemonic ideas about black masculinity, migrants, entitlement and belonging. Chapter 7 builds upon the previous chapter’s discussion about infrapolitical transcultural solidarities by exploring the ways in which people in street markets actively organised to resist attempts by the State to take away their livelihoods. The chapter looks at the antihegemonic talk through which improvisational and ambiguous forms of solidarity
and in what way. The making of boundaries can result in the reinforcement of gender, class, nation and ethnic hierarchies. In the only other book-length examination of the black sporting diaspora in Canada, Abdel-Shehid ( 2005 , p. 8) describes black masculinities in sporting contexts as “heterosexual at minimum, and misogynist and hypermacho at maximum.” Among the Mavericks, gay men were occasionally
In my search for tidy conclusions and a singular confirmation of the meaning of sport in the Black Atlantic, I came up empty handed, or “wit’ me two long arms” as cricket club members might say. There are so many dimensions to the transnational flows of peoples and cultures of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora that have important bearing on how we think about black masculinities
conform to respectable public performances are positioned as “anti-women,” who undermine social, economic and political nationalist projects. To mark the boundary around his own middle-class black masculinity, he had been taught to create notable distinctions in habit, speech and style from working classes and from women. To see a woman “cussing” outdoors in the way he and his peers do was unacceptable