Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora

Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora. By Jana Evans Braziel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. ISBN: 0253219787.300 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. In Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora, Braziel investigates cultural constructions of black masculinity through the Haitian Kreyol concept of givo neg (big men in English) as represented in the works of six artists. Braziel investigates these representative figures embody the signified neg and (re-)define themselves beyond the signifiers and boundaries of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nation-state, and citizenship in the Americas. The book gives special attention to the writer Dany Laferriere, film director Raoul Peck, drag queen and poet Assotto Saint (a.k.a Yves Francois Lubin), gender illusionist and drag king performer Dred (a.k.a. Mildred Gerestant), rap musician Wyclef Jean, and the poetartist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Braziel argues that black masculinity in the Haitian diaspora is a cultural phenomenon in terms of the respective writers and artists have reconfigured and reconstructed the notions of America and American identity. The author contends that big man-ism or neg is a engagement in the Haitian diasporic community and insists that the concept expresses cross-cultural politics, protest, and resistance. Accordingly, the book's key concern is an attempt to present a critical analysis of how Haitian diasporic writers, performance artists, film directors, and musicians are also altering notions of America and American identity and thereby participating in emergent forms of remapping (5), particularly in the United States and Canada. Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora begins with an introductory note on Transnational Politics of 'Big Man-ism' and ends with a reflective summary on Presidential Politics, Haiti's Gwo negs, and Diasporic Cultural Production as Transnational Political Protest. The book is subdivided into three equal parts: Part 1: Straight, Queer, and Street, Part 2: Queer Fist, and Part 3: Rapping B(l)ack. The author begins the essay by considering neg as a theoretical concept in its Haitian cultural and political milieus. She observes that Haiti's politics in particular has been subjected to the ritualistic practices and complex cultural codes of negs (1). From a general stance, to be a gwo neg in Haiti and its diaspora is to be a powerful man, one who commands respect, social stature, and, above all, authority (ibid). Gwo neg is also painted as a cult operating in a triangular dimension: local, national, and diasporic. In Part 1: Straight, Queer, and Street, Braziel contends that black heteromasculinity is both textual and deconstructive performances and constructions of the stereotype of black hyperheteromasculinity, arguing from the respective works of novelist Laferriere and filmmaker Peck. Braziel's rereading of Laferriere 's How to Make Love to a Black Man without Getting Exhausted situates the work as a poetic of freedom as well as a protest against the American construction of black heteromasculinity and the culturalideological imagination and connotation of the black male body/sexuality and identity. Braziel insists that Laferriere's concept of le Negre is an explosive dynamic in the Late-Capitalist American racial machine desirante, and argues for the need to read Laferriere's black masculine (reconstruction through diasporic distance. Finally, Braziel remarks that Laferriere's textual representations and philosophical engagements with black male sexuality in the context of a trans-American racial machine-desirante is an existential struggle for racial, sexual, and gender equality in the Americas (36). Next, Braziel engages filmmaker-producer Peck with particular attention to his most famous film: Haitian Corner, a movie that accentuates the impacts of Duvalierism and the state military apparatus both in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, which Braziel identifies as transnational regimes of violence and state terror. …

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