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In his insightful essay "A Black Man's Places) in Black Feminist Criticism," Michael Awkward asks an important question: "Can black men like himself-those who are deeply invested in resisting patriarchal power, and for whom black women's lives, art, and literature have been crucial to their own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development-do black feminist criticism?" Responding to the womanist criticism of Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams and the psychoanalytical approach of Hortense Spillers, Awkward answers the question by emphasizing the role of black men in analyzing the "practices of patriarchy that have already divided us" (15). He concentrates on the ways that black men's criticism of black women's texts can enhance the study of black women's literature. For this criticism to be productive, Awkward argues, black men must eschew "traditional patriarchal desires for control and erasure of the 'female,'" and perform "sophisticated, informed, and contentious critiques of phallocentric practices ... in an effort to redefine our notions of black male (and female) textuality and subjectivity" (21).
Awkward furnishes a useful methodology for aspiring black male feminists. Preoccupied, however, with "legitimizing" black men who critique black female texts, he does not adequately emphasize the potential role of black male feminists who engage black male texts. In this essay, I extend Awkward's theoretical project to provide a black male feminist critique of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go. To date, Himes's crucial text has not received a serious black feminist critique of any kind. My black male feminist reading of If He Hollers interrogates Himes's rendering of women-black and white-as proponents of black male social emasculation. Focusing attention on the marginalized perspectives of the black women in the text, I reconsider the received image of Bob Jones, the central protagonist, as a "Black Everyman." Illuminating Himes's phallocentric assumptions regarding black women, this perspective calls attention to the erasure of the black female social perspectives in the novel. To redress this erasure, I consider Ella Mae's criticism of Bob Jones's relationship with Madge, and her compelling critique of his black masculine crisis. Such consideration sheds new light on the gendered politics of Jones's perspective. It becomes evident, for example, that Jones's understanding of his socioeconomic oppression is linked to his frustration at not being able fully...