Core Response: The Shifting Tides of "Crossover" Black Masculinity

In "Crossing Over," his examination of the star image of African American performer Paul Robeson, Richard Dyer analyzes a black-and-white nude photograph of the actor taken in 1926. His reading of the photo finds an "analogy of this visual treatment of Robeson with that of women" and argues that any potential eroticism of the star is made "ambivalent" by its affinity with "the classical nude" (Dyer 115). In its 1920s context, Robeson's nude imagery constructed what Dyer calls "a double articulation" in which erotic images could be presented "without arousal" by virtue of their classicism in the detached language of "art school ideology" (119). Dyer agues that Robeson's status as a "crossover" star whose achievements in academics, sports, music, the theatrical stage, and the cinema as well as his appeal for both black and white audiences made him a figure of social significance depended upon the racially motivated, desexualizing project of a society that just wanted Robeson to stand still, to be simultaneously visible and invisible. This analysis reveals a common practice in dominant discourse of the mid-20th century to represent black masculinity as non-active and immobile, stripped of the visual potential for free, powerful movement. In order to depict Robeson as the idealized black male figure, his body—perceived as the essence of his blackness— must be contained and unthreatening, stripped of its dangerous sexuality. Robeson was held frozen in a faceless, sexless pose and captured in front of the camera and on the stage.

More than half a century later, Michael Jackson—a star similarly credited with achieving "crossover" status due to his transcendent popularity producing black music in white rock and pop markets—embodied a very different model of black masculinity. Mercer's "Monster Metaphors" calls Michael Jackson's star image a "social hieroglyph" in the Marxist sense, performing "a spectacle of racial and sexual indeterminacy" that demands and resists decoding. Rather than freezing blackness into a static, unambiguous image appealing to an presumed black "essence," Jackson's image is hyper-mobile. Mercer's reference to the "sexual vagueness" of Jackson's body calls back to Dyer's commentary Robeson's "ambivalent" non-sexuality, but signals an evolution in representations of black masculinity. Jackson's sexual indeterminacy erupts through his dancing movements in concert with his androgynous image in a way that muddles hegemonic signifiers of racial and sexual difference as opposed to essentializing them. I would suggest that this visual liminality is attached to the element of physical (and metaphorical) mobility that is missing from the bodily context that Dyer describes in his Paul Robeson study. Jackson elides the apparent American fear of the unfettered black male body on screen with a physically kinetic intertextual identity as his star text.