Scenes of Trauma: Violent Rites, Migration, and the Performance of Afro-Caribbean Masculinities is an interdisciplinary project that combines cultural studies, film, gender, and postcolonial studies to investigate Afro-Caribbean models of masculinity in film and literature. My project details the ways in which imperialist phallocentric masculinity is valorized within African American cinema and exported to the Caribbean where it is mimicked and valorized. Secondly, I am interested in an analysis of the reverse journey. While Afro-Caribbean men have long been a part of African American culture and have contributed greatly to the shaping of African American masculinities, much of the recent work on African American masculinities studies have tended to flatten out the diversity of men from across the African Diaspora as simply Black, ignoring the nuances of migration and its effects on the performance of Blackness and maleness of these subjects within their new locations.

My study introduces Afro-Caribbean masculinity into the scholarly discussion of African American masculinities started by several African American cultural critics such as Mark Anthony Neal and bell hooks. Both of these prominent scholars in African American studies criticize the construction of African American masculinity as presented in African American culture. They, and others, call for a more progressive Black masculinity, one that supports Black feminism and fights homophobia. Much of their critique also applies to Afro-Caribbean culture, which has been strongly influenced by African American culture in regard to the traumatizing transition between boyhood and manhood which has great influence on Black males perspectives on feminism and homophobia. hook’s critique in particular challenges the passive acceptance of “soul murder” or, in other words, silent acceptance of trauma as rites of passage into manhood for African American men. I take up hook’s critique in my analysis of the post independence Afro-Caribbean productions of Black masculinity as they reiterate similar problematic performances of Black masculinity. I am especially interested in how Afro-Caribbean performance of masculinity is affected when Black men from the Caribbean migrate to the metropole, specifically the United States and Britain.

To this end, I juxtapose contemporary representations of Afro-Caribbean masculinities, produced in the new millennium, with earlier presentations, developed during the Black Power movement in the 1970s when Black filmmakers and authors produced images of Black masculinity built on soul murder. I am interested in whether contemporary productions engage new and progressive forms of Black masculinity or simply rearticulate conventional representations of Black masculinity that draw on dominant patriarchal and homophobic modes of gender performance. I suggest that many of the contemporary Black filmmakers and writers whose work I examine here remain ambivalent to challenging the phallocentric patriarchal masculinist practices of traumatic rites of passage for Black boys into manhood; however, there are others who offer glimpses into what a challenge to that model might look like.