Studying Black Male Subjectivity in the US

Joseph Smith, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Philosophy, Undergraduate Director for Africana Studies, SIU Carbondale, USA

New Projects Seminar Series: Studying Black Male Subjectivity in the US

December 4, 2024, 14:30 – 15:30

Room 268, Staszic Palace, Nowy Świat 72, Warsaw

Abstract

Toxic masculinity, misogynist, and patriarch are some of the white anthological conceptual frameworks used to examine the conditions that give rise to the defensively assertive, and criminal and thug character-type found in popular Black culture. These conceptual frameworks are also used to explain how this character-type has become one of the dominate modes of being-in-the-world in the formation of Black male subjectivity within the United States.

This seminar seeks to provide an alternative account. Using the insights of W. E. B. Du Bois, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, and Michel Foucault, this lecture provides a schematic account of the material, ontological, and discursive conditions that socially produce Black males within the United States as inferior others.  Specifically, we will use Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction to establish how Black males are socially produced as an inferior object that must internalize their inferior position. After establishing our framework, we will turn to the work of George Yancy and Loic Waquant to further “map out” the objectifying and internalizing mechanics that seek to socially produce Black male subjectivity as an inferior other. 

The questions this talk asks are the following. First, can white anthropological conceptual frameworks be merely applied to study Black male subject formation? Second, what are the conditions for Black males to be socially produced as inferior objects? Lastly, is there a relationship between Black males announcing themselves as the defensively assertive, criminal and thug character-type, and white-power structures, or are such Black males simply pathological?

Joseph L. Smith has a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies, and the School of History and Philosophy, at the Southern Illinois University, SIU Carbondale, USA. Smith’s teaching and research interests include Black Male Studies, Africana Philosophy, Foucault Studies, Prison Studies, and the emergence of the Breton-Woods Institute, WTO, Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements.

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