Black Aesthetics and Panther Rhetoric: A Critical Decoding of Black Masculinity in The Black Panther, 1967—80

Abstract

This article provides a critical decoding of black masculine representations in the Black Panther Party newspaper — The Black Panther. Through a random sample of 100 issues inclusive of 1316 articles from 1967 to 1980, the analysis focuses on both the aesthetic and rhetorical devices that construct black masculinity. These depictions do not turn on agendas to install `positive' images in order to contest `negative' ones, but are concerned with a recuperation of power and self-determinism to reframe the terms of debate over those representations. Findings challenge earlier assumptions that black nationalist (and specifically Black Panther) conceptions of black masculinity were predicated solely on essentialized, fixed, and patriarchal identities, and posit that these representations yielded a fluid and socially constructed notion of a black self founded upon a resistive politic.