Rolland Murray opens his book, Our Living Manhood with a death of man. The man, Malcolm X, his experience as an African American and his status as a father of Black Nationalism and his ultimate assassination makes it a great metaphor that reflects historical, cultural and ideological complexity of the Black Power Era. Malcolm X lived experiences of many black men: he began his life as a victim of racism, then became a hustler and later evolved into a pious and intelligent man. Later he submitted himself to the hegemony of patriarchy but died as a man open to different voices and ideologies. His death triggered both Black Power and Black Arts Movements and signified a change in nature and significance of Black masculinity, which is at the heart of Murray’s argument.
Patriarchal family at the core of Black institution and ideology since the 19th century, also propagated by the Nation of Islam and the early Malcolm X, gave way to new ideological constructions of masculinity. Unlike the earlier bourgeois structures, the strengthening Marxist ideologies and institutions like Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panther Party reinforced masculinity and masculine body alone as a goal for new Black ideological formations. Murray poignantly points out that due to absence of a specific geographical terrain and solid Black nationalist institutions, identity and ideology become the backbone of Black nationalism. And this new, masculine identity and its lionization becomes the new ideological and aesthetic goal, many writers and scholars rush to highlight its dangers.
In order to effectively recruit people into the armies of Black nation, Black Artists chose poetry and drama to as dominant methods of artistic expression. These genres, Murray argues, posses the interpolative effect so needed for the survival of Black Nationalism. Due to this phenomenon, scholar explains, novel became a marginalized genre, and therefore, the last resort for criticism of the ideologies of misogyny homophobia that were eroding the black national consciousness. This brings up another Black Power aspect that Murray effectively deconstructs in his book: cultural nationalism and its obsession with male performance and male rhetoric, along with its problems.
My concern with his choice of novel as a vehicle for deconstruction of Black masculinity is that Black Arts and Black Power, was, in many ways about seeking new, alternative cultural forms and cultural spaces, which were found in innovative and radical aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement . I believe that drama, and, especially poetry, are deeply rooted in African diasporic culture and that is why Black Arts poetry and its experiment with poetic forms and music became the major historical and aesthetic legacy of the movement. By rejecting poetry and its legacy as an ideological matrix of Black Power, Murray makes his argument fragmented and incomprehensible.
Even though Murray examines a wide scope of writers: James Allen McPherson, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Hal Bennett, and John Oliver Killens. His initiative of introducing a discussion of a marginalized genders and sexualities by the means of a marginalized genre is innovative and interesting, however, its accuracy and depth are at question.
Murray poignantly highlights James Baldwin’s evolution from a prolific and audacious critic of gender and sexuality, to his later adaptation of phalocentric ideas due to his adherence to Black Power. Murray reveals Baldwin to be the major force behind the change in masculine ideologies of Black Americans triggered by Black Power. Murray carefully traces the ways in which Baldwin’s early criticism of oppressive masculinities fades away with the growth of his alliance with Black Power and reveals the gradual deterioration of his earlier radical views.Nevertheless, Murray’s standing towards Baldwin’s writing lacks confidence, since he simultaneously tries to justify Baldwin’s decisions and phalocentric literary and ideological practices.
The scholar’s argument discusses the building blocks of Black nationalism : ideology, identity, performance, and illuminates the controversy embedded in masculine and phalocentric ideas and aesthetics. The major problem with his analysis is the purely theoretical nature of his discourse. In other words, even though Murray discusses multiple dimensions of what Black nationalism strived to be theoretically and ideologically, but does not pay enough attention to the history of the movement and what it came to be.