In 1903, forty years after the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation, W. E. B. Dubois published The Souls of Black Folk a semi-autobiographical, non-fictional narrative about the material and discursive conditions that continually create African American subjectivity as a “problem.” I argue that in utilizing the heuristics of philosophical discourse to articulate African American subjectivity, Dubois’ text highlights what turned out to be the central preoccupation of the African American intellectual tradition: the cognitive disconnect between white and black subjectivity.
For Dubois, and other African American intellectuals, the problem has been the contradiction between the letter of the law and the abject material conditions of African Americans in the New Republic. Rhetorically speaking, the problem that African American intellectuals engage is the burden of representation or the struggle to define oneself outside of social stereotypes about black identity. Thus, I argue that African American intellectuals such as Dubois, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, and Michael Eric Dyson have articulated the problem and described new paradigms that may be used to recover African American subjectivity. In the context of this tradition, I explore how Baldwin and Morrison represent African American male subjectivity construction within the discursive divide of identity and subjectivity.
By explicating the fictional texts Beloved, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Song of Solomon, and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, I present a complex male subjectivity in response to definitive studies that argue that Baldwin’s and Morrison’s male characters wholeheartedly or mistakenly embrace or practice Western patriarchy. My analysis demonstrates how male characters construct subjectivities from within the African American context, which means outside of traditional definitions of class, patriarchy, Christianity, nationalism, and masculinity to argue for what bell hooks describes in Black Looks: Race and Representation as “a diverse understanding of masculinity.” Influenced by cultural studies and post-colonial methodology, my dissertation moves beyond Fanonian dialectics examining how black identity is defined by white subjectivity to explore how the male characters employ the rhetoric of body and language to define themselves as men within and without African American cultural contexts.