Of Masks,Mimicry,Misogyny,and Miscegenation: Forging Black South African Masclinity in Bloke Modisane's Blame Me on History

Abstract

This essay analyzes the dilemma of black male South African intellectuals of the 1950s, of whom autobiographer Bloke Modisane was a pivotal example. Exiled in the aftermath of the harsh apartheid laws of the 1960s, these artists were trapped on a precarious divide between the white artistic world and the black political milieu, never fully belonging to either. Modisane uses the strategies of masking to reclaim a sense of masculinity erased by racist and colonialist exploitation; simultaneously, however, he displaces his own anxieties about acceptance by whites through misogyny, particularly toward black women. I theorize my work on Modisane through recourse to the work of Martinican psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, who analyzes the results of a racist gaze on black male identity formation, and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, who posits mimicry as a mode of partial self-affirmation for colonized subjects.