Abstract
The identities of people of African ancestry in the United States are not unaffected by the complex and ever shifting relations among political, economic, cultural, and psychological forces. Though identity discourses may draw upon the psychocultural traces of previous historical phases, black subjectivity is enunciated in particular ways during the historical period and specific social formations within which it emerges. This chapter examines the myriad of dynamics that impact the articulation and development of African American identities in the neoliberal age. In this study, black identity development is understood as occurring in “the multileveled interplay between historically situated subjects who act and materially grounded structures that… enable and constrain such action.”1
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Notes
Cornel West, “Race and Social Theory,” in The Cornel West Reader., ed. Cornel West (New York: Basic Civitas Books), 1999, 257.
bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics , ed. Gloria Watkins. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990, 29.
India Arie, “I Am Not My Hair,” in Testimony: vol. 1, Life &; Relationship (New York: Motown Records, 2006), track 11, verse 3, lines 1 and 2, and chorus, written by Shannon Sanders, Alecia Moore, India Arie Simpson and Andre Ramsey.
bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 179.
See J. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000).
Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 27.
Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), written by Tupac Shakur, Femi Ojetunde, Jamal Joseph, Royal Iman Bayyan, Tarik Jackson Bayyan, Samaria Graham, Universal Music Publishing Group.
William E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1995), 221.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader , ed. Padmini Mongia (New York: Arnold, 1997), 116.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth , trans. by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 45.
The idea of white supremacy is understood in this study as having been constituted as an object of modern discourse in the West, independent from the demands of the prevailing modes of production or the political interests of imperial powers. The doctrine of white supremacy has from its inception had a life and logic of its own within history, related to and intersecting with economic and political factors, but not reducible to the interests or forces emanating from these realms. The doctrine of white supremacy predates capitalism. Images of blackness constructed through discourse, literature, and art can be found in Roman times. The current conception of white supremacy is grounded historically in the rise of modernity. Modern white racism was a product of the Enlightenment. Several scholars have done substantive examinations of the development of white supremacy as a modern discourse. See Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982);
Frank M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: An Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993);
David Theo Goldberg, “Modernity, Race and Morality” in Race Critical Theories , ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
H. Adlai Murdoch, “(Re)Figuring Colonialism: Narratological and Ideological Resistance,” Callaloo 15, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 2.
Lillian Comas-Diaz, “An Ethnopolitical Approach to Working with People of Color,” American Psychologist 55.11 (November 2000): 1320.
See James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 115–117.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 77.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks , trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 38.
David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 181.
Charles F. Peterson, Du Bois, Fanon, Cabral (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 94.
See Michel Foucault, Power , ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994).
Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Pastoral Theology in an Intercultural World (London: Epworth, 2007), 43.
Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 1994): 21.
Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , ed. Morley, David and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (New York: Routledge, 1996), 437.
See William E. Cross, Jr., Thomas A. Parham, and Janet E. Helms, “Nigrescence Revisited: Theory and Research ,” in African American Identity Development , ed. Reginald L. Jones (Hampton, VA: Cobb and Henry, 1998), 3–71.
See Thomas Parham, Psychological Storms: The African American Struggle for Identity (Chicago: African American Images, 1993), 39–40.
Na’im Akbar, Akbar Papers in African Psychology (Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions and Associates, 2003), 160.
Wade Nobles, “Introduction,” in Psychological Storms: The African American Struggle for Identity , by Thomas A. Parham (Chicago: African American Images, 1993), iii.
See Cornel West’s discussion in “The In dispens ability Yet In sufficiency of Marxist Theory,” The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 213–230.
See Erik H. Erikson, “Black Identity,” in Childhood and Society , ed. Erick H. Erikson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963 rev. ed.), 241–246;
Erik H. Erikson, “A Memorandum on Identity and Negro Youth,” (1964) in A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980 , ed. Stephen Schlein (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 644–659;
Erik H. Erikson, “Race and the Wider Identity,” in Identity: Youth and Crisis , ed. Erik H. Erikson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 295–320. In addition, in the concluding lecture in Dimensions of a New Identity (New York: W. W. Norton , 1974), Erikson addresses the challenges of African Americans who are neither able to choose to be different nor free to decide to remain what they are (114).
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1952) is a groundbreaking treatise that explores the dynamics of imperial domination. While it calls attention to the significance of political and economic factors, the focus is on the challenges of identity development in a dominating white society that takes its supremacy for granted. Though some point to a lack of theoretical sophistication in Black Skin, White Masks , it nonetheless represents a revolutionary “opening salvo” that subverts the hold of universalized Western discourses. In Lola Young, “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation , ed. A. Read (London: I.C.A., 1996), Lola Young rightly criticizes Fanon for his exclusion of black women in his theoretical frameworks. And while it is arguable whether a charge of sexism is warranted, Fanon’s use of the term man to connote humanness in Black Skins, White Masks effectively mutes issues related to gender difference in the colonial encounter. When Fanon explicitly reflects upon how this “paranoid fantasy” works for black Antillean women he concludes: “I know nothing about her” (180). While these admissions and omissions are certainly troubling, it is clear that Fanon’s work has contributed immensely to contemporary theorizing regarding black identity development in the context of white supremacism and imperial domination. Also see Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait , trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution , trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 34.
See Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 52–103.
Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004), 9.
Ronald Hall, “The Bleaching Syndrome: African Americans’ Response to Cultural Domination Vis-à-vis Skin Color,” Journal of Black Studies 26, no. 2 (November 1995): 172–184.
bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 12.
Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 59.
See Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 121–131.
See John Clarke, “Style,” in Resistance through Rituals , ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (New York: Routledge, 1993), 149–150.
See C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966) and
C. Levi-Strauss, Totemism (New York: Penguin, 1969).
James Procter, Stuart Hall (New York: Routledge, 2004), 91.
See James E. Marcia, “Development and Validation of Ego Identity Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1996): 551–558.
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© 2016 Cedric C. Johnson
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Johnson, C.C. (2016). Black Roses, Cracked Concrete. In: Race, Religion, and Resilience in the Neoliberal Age. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_3
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