On Black Men by David Marriott

This is a researched and footnoted academic volume that was an alternative read for my book group one month. I finished the book we chose and started on this, and got stalled because it is populated by mutilated, dying or dead, black men, and it was so brutal in the way that it portrayed the way that black men play a role in the psychic life of American culture in general to southern culture in particular. This is a reflection on the persistent imagining of what black men must be, a demand that black men perform a script, become interchangeable with the uncanny, deeply unsettling, projections of culture. It is a powerful and compelling study that explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. David Marriott draws upon a range of examples, from lynching photographs to recent Hollywood films, as well as the ideas of key thinkers including Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and John Edgar Wideman, to reveal a vicious pantomime of the predominant culture taking a look at itself through images of black desolation, and of blacks intimately dispossessed by that self-same looking.