Public Lecture by Prof. Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
Time and Venue: Wednesday, April 5, 2023, from 3 p.m to 4 p.m in Room 3302
This talk presents the research I did for the edited volume Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which examines the representation of diverse black masculinities in Zadie Smith’s third novel, On Beauty (2005), attending to how they are segregated and policed but also how their borders can be often crossed. The fluidity of those identities is proved through the analysis of the fictional portrayal of the psychological struggle of a mixed-race young man, Levi Belsey, who has to choose the detoxed masculinity that will allow him to feel at home within his own skin but also to become a ‘good’ black man in his own terms. Following Mahtani (2014), Levi’s changing behaviour can be understood as an example of “racialized performativity’, characteristic of mixed race people. Underpinning my analysis is the notion that, in the age of #Black Lives Matter, a non-toxic masculinity is one that cultivates a broad ethics of social responsibility and that is therefore deeply imbricated with the struggle against all forms of oppression: racism, police brutality, violence against women, neo-colonial and extractive practices, etc. I argue that, in the character of Levi Belsey, Zadie Smith displays a profound understanding of the toxicity surrounding black youth and she outlines the contours of a de-toxed black masculinity in our times.
BIO
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Huelva, Spain. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation, and race. Her latest publications are the articles “The Legacy of Angélique in Late 20th-Century Black Canadian Drama” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2022) and “Black Disability and Diasporic Haunting in Diana Evans’s The Wonder” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2022) and the open-access edited collection Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance, with M.I. Romero Ruiz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is currently team member of the international project Thanatic Ehics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces.