Power, Resistance, and Black Masculine Identity in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer

Abstract

Attempts to reconstruct black masculinity can be traced to the nineteenth-century slave narratives that challenged white representations of black male identity. In the wake of Obama’s rise to presidency and the recent surge in public killing of black men, contemporary African American writers have revisited the antebellum narratives through the neo-slave narrative genre to reconsider the question of black masculinity. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019) is one such attempt to return to the Antebellum South to revisit the pain and suffering inflicted on generations of black men, women, and children while highlighting the significance of memory, narrative, and history in the pursuit of freedom. This article analyzes the text’s representation of black male subjectivity, agency, and resistance through a conceptual framework drawn from Foucault’s theorization of power and resistance; R. W. Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity; and bell hooks’s conception of black masculinity. Through a close analysis of the representation of black male subjectivity in the novel, the essay explores how black men resist systems of white male hegemonic power through their memory’s journey that not only allows them to understand their extraordinary powers but also redefine their masculinity. The essay concludes that through a representation of complex and multifaceted black male characters, Coates represents models of progressive black masculinity that challenge the received notions of hegemonic masculinity through their past consciousness.