Between art and activism: political masculinities in Caribbean narratives of revolution

Abstract

This article enquires into imaginations of ‘political masculinity’ in a Caribbean-British context and the engagement of artists with the ideologies of the political sphere and their co-construction of it. The article focuses on gendered strategies of political self-fashioning in George Lamming’s Water With Berries and Orlando Patterson’s An Absence of Ruins, which emerge from the tension between political engagement and artistic detachment that structures the work and public image of Caribbean artists and their political interpellation into the public sphere. I propose that artists manoeuvre in a political field of tension as regards citizenship, nation building and cultural authority – themselves inherently gendered concepts – by problematising the basis of black revolutionary politics as tied to essentialised codes of masculinity that in turn rest on specific ideals of cultural authority, such as the (Victorian) ‘man of letters’, the ‘peasant’ or ‘folk hero’, or a more radical political masculine blackness associated with Black Power.