Friday, January 8, 2027: 2:10 PM
Grand Ballroom E (Sheraton New Orleans)
This presentation examines the normative construction of black artist masculinities in 1960s South African visual arts through reviews published in anti-apartheid literary magazines such as The Classic and The New African. Reading these reviews as gendered texts rather than neutral commentary, I argue that they articulate a highly specific black artist persona: male, politically conscious, urban, and committed to an unsentimental realist aesthetic. The future of African art is imagined through this figure, whose authority derives from his willingness to render township life and slum environments as sites of moral witness. The reviews consistently frame artistic value in terms of political engagement and representational courage. Realism, especially with a humanist inflection, becomes the privileged medium through which black artistic masculinity is authenticated. In this discourse, the black male artist appears as both victim and visionary, at once endangered by apartheid and elevated as its most credible critic. His legitimacy is secured not only through subject matter but also through the solidarities articulated by predominantly white reviewers who position themselves as ethically aligned with his plight. These solidarities, however, are not neutral. They participate in producing a normative masculinity that conflates political seriousness with male embodiment and oppositional authority. While at times African masculinity is invoked explicitly, more often it is constructed implicitly through narrative emphasis, evaluative language, and selective visibility. The near absence of women artists from these reviews is telling. Their omission is not incidental but constitutive of the archive’s gendered logic. By foregrounding how aesthetic judgment, political solidarity, and archival silence converge, this paper emphasizes how institutions and mediating publics produce, authorize, and delimit particular forms of African masculinity.