Abstract
In a 2010 interview with Jay-Z, National Public Radios (NPR’s) Terry Gross expressed shock that Jay-Z was inspired by Broadway and Annie. Speaking about “Hard Knock Life” Gross asked Shawn Carter about the history of the song: “Hard Knock Life,” which really surprised me when I first heard it because you sample the song “Hard Knock Life” from the Broadway show “Annie,” which I thought was a real surprise … GROSS: … surprising choice for you. JAY-Z: To say the least. GROSS: Yes, to say the least.
To Gross, Broadway, the theater, and a play about a redheaded girl seemed incongruous to hip-hop and even blackness. In his book, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, Neal takes up the issue of the visibility/invisibility of black male identity, arguing that certain bodies, behaviors, experiences, and identities are legible and illegible within contemporary America.
The book’s title comes from Neal’s childhood fascination with Fame’s Leroy (played by Gene Anthony Ray) and that his interest, reading, and confusion surrounding Leroy’s black identity propelled his work to this day. “The cornrows, the way his body moved, the way he dressed … As a fifteen and sixteen-year-old, I also thought that this was a character that was gay,” noted Neal in an NPR interview. “It just raised a question for me about why are we just so tied to these kind of readings of black men and boys … that you either have to be hypermasculine or you have to be queer.” Neal elucidates the ways that body, athleticism, physical presence, and stereotype all shape the legibility and illegibility of black masculinity. “When we see a black man with a basketball we don't even have to process that,” noted Neal. “We know exactly what that means. If we were to see a black man with a violin that gives us reason to pause.”
Neal successfully brings into conversation discourses on black popular culture, black masculinity, and queer of color critique. Whereas debates often center on positive/negative representations, antiblack racism, and the politics of respectability, Neal moves the conversation in important ways. Looking for Leroy works to “render ‘legible’ black male bodies” (p. 8). Highlighting moments and instances of disruption (and legitimation) ranging from Fame’s Leroy to The Wire’s Stringer Bell, Neal brings into conversation those “so-called illegible black bodies—those black male bodies we can’t believe are real” (p. 8)—Neal provides the language to rethink what constitutes an authentic or “legible” black masculinity.
One of the more prominent themes of Looking for Leroy is that of movement. Neal argues that the legibility and illegibility of black masculinity is very much tied to motion and mobility. Black masculinity is more than a flattened object, ideological and financial commodity, and a source of derision, surveillance, discipline, and punishment. Neal challenges the dehumanizing process that denies black masculinity agency and mobility describing the legibility of a static black masculinity within the dominant imagination. Evidence in the image of lazy deadbeat black father, incarcerated criminals, and the rapper “keeping it real,” hegemonic representations of black masculinity offer little room for contradiction and complexity.
Neal not only highlights the multiple inscriptions of black masculinity within contemporary popular culture, but examines disruption, vehicles of change, and spaces of insurgent counternarratives. For example, within his discussion of Hawk (Avery Brooks—Spencer for Hire), Neal argues that his cosmopolitanism, his worldliness, and his broad range of interests encapsulate his literal and metaphoric movement. He is neither defined by nor confined to the narrow scripts imagined as authentic to black men. In a similarly brilliant chapter on Jay-Z, Neal argues, “Shawn Carter serves as a point of entry to examine more concretely how black bodies…travel through the world but also how the world travels through those bodies” (p. 39). Reflecting on Carter’s multiple identities and personalities—his “adaptability” and “fungibility”—and global presence, Neal spotlights Jay-Z’s dynamism. To understand the career of Shawn Carter is to understand the flexibility and fluidity of black masculinity.
As with his discussion of R. Kelley and Luther Vandross, Neal questions the scrutiny and surveillance directed at black bodies; trapped in a myriad of closets, black popular culture represents a space where black man embody, negotiate, and challenge these incarcerating practices. Looking for Leroy is not exclusively invested in the regulation and production of black masculinity but the ways that artists navigate and challenge the flattened but legible representations of black masculinity.
Neal reminds readers that the challenge is bigger than celebrating counterhegemonic representations. “The act of looking for Leroy, like the search for Langston before him might represent a theoretical axis to perform the critic exegesis that contemporary black masculinity demands” (p. 8). Neal provides readers with the language and gaze to understand the illegible masculinities of Luther and Jay-Z, R. Kelly and Leroy, all while spotlighting those contested sites of intervention that demand literacy about black masculine identity formation.