Power, Resistance, and Black Masculinity: Reconstruction of Identities in Post-Obama African American Men’s Fiction

Abstract

The rise of Barack Hussein Obama to presidency was a landmark moment that initiated a fresh debate about race relations in the US. While some proclaimed that America had entered a post-racial era, others highlighted the persistence of racial discrimination to argue otherwise. Within black masculinity studies, Obama’s image as the epitome of African American achievement renewed interest in the historical construction of black masculine identities in the US. However, most of this research is theoretical or quantitative in nature, with no attention paid to the literary representations of black masculinity in the post-Obama period. This study, therefore, examines contemporary African American men’s fiction to explore its reconstruction of black masculine identities in the post-Obama period. The thesis analyzes Leonard Pitts Jr.’s Before I Forget (2009) and Freeman (2012), Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow (2019), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019), from a primary conceptual framework based in Foucauldian theory of power and resistance, R. W. Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity, and Saidiya Hartman’s notions of subjection and self-making, alongside a secondary framework drawn from Athena D. Mutua’s concept of progressive black masculinities and bell hooks’s notion of counter-hegemonic cultural practices for conceiving liberatory black subjectivities. While the primary framework helps explore the interaction between white power structures and black resistance, the secondary framework examines the possibilities of resistance that emerge from black men’s interactions with power structures. The thesis concludes that post-Obama African American men’s fiction subverts dominant discourses on black masculinity by challenging white male hegemonic structures of power through black characters’ past-consciousness and homeward journeys as acts of resistance in order to construct radical and progressive forms of black masculinity. The study contributes to the growing field of black masculinity studies within the context of a post-Obama US.