Performing black masculinities: Johannesburg's performance poets and their counter narratives of resistance to normative ideas of black malehood in mainstream cinema
Date
2015-03-05
Authors
Shange, Belinda K
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Abstract
The politics of representation around racialized gendered identities is one that is
particularly crucial in a country whose historical discourse privileged racist and sexist
constructions of blackness. Dominant cinema (i.e. Classic Hollywood Cinema) has since
its inception rendered black identities ‘invisible’ by representing an idea of blackness that
signifies sub-humanness, infantilism, hypersexualization, inherent criminalization. This
paper postulates that the South African mainstream cinema landscape has largely utilized
classic Hollywood cinema’s strategies in its representation of blackness and it continues
to maintain regressive constructions particularly in relation to black masculinities. The
South African gangster film genre has played a particularly pertinent role in signifying
the ‘Otherness’ of black malehood.
This paper aims to re-imagine normative notions of black malehood in South African
mainstream cinema. It proposes that performance poetry serves as a vehicle through
which young black male poets in Johannesburg re-conceptualize popular media’s
normative representations of black masculinities. Their poetry functions as a conduit that
confronts and challenges stereotypical images of black malehood in South African
mainstream cinema and in popular media in general.