The Modernity of Black Masculinity in 'If the Beale Street Could Talk' by James Baldwin

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The Modernity of Black Masculinity in If the Beale Street Could Talk
"If the Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin develops a set of characters confronting stereotyping forces challenging their identities. The plot holds a love story of a black girl, Tish, with a black boy, Fonny, tightly tied to the underlying theme of turmoil behind the ideal of American manhood. Seemingly, it is a romantic drama manifesting black lives, their racism problems, social isolation, and inequality outcomes. The author has attempted to reveal the drastic changes in the idealism of manhood for the black and white community in America; everything wrapped up in a social protest. James Baldwin connects the internalized sexism and hate crimes in the novel by metaphorically conceptualizing modern black masculinity, representing vitality and power chained by the unjust criminal justice system.
The story is set in Beale Street, New York, ideally representing the black culture with their lifestyle, hobbies, and interest, showcasing both major characters from the black community. Although the actual Beale Street is not in New York, Tennessee, the author's setting of plot in a fictional Beale Street in New York with its black protagonists intensifies the focus on the development of black culture through the past years because New York is the blackest city of America. Narrowing the idea of space, the author provides a closer and clearer glance at the black lives of New York with courageous black youth in the hands of a stereotypical gender-based criminal law. Tish swears that "New York must be the ugliest and dirtiest city in the world" (Baldwin 6). She compares the city with abundant black residences to hell, where people can "smell the people frying" (Baldwin 6). Her swear magnifies the torment of Fonny to the experience of all black men living in an earth-like hell, New York, which literally and metaphorically pressurizes them to accept the authority of whites. Therefore, the valor of Fonny, who is the embodiment of the current twentieth century's black American heroism, leaves him behind bars as an outcome of teaching a lesson to a morally corrupt white man. Although Fonny has to face the music of doing an act of bravery at the expense of white pride, he, living in the blackest city of America, symbolizes the vitality of African American masculinity, challenging the internalized sexism in the country.
A number of critics discovered the concepts of the modernity of black manhood in Baldwin's works. They explored Fonny's and other black characters' representation of manhood as fresh and contradictory to the past slavery. Norman considers the author as one of the most creative fictional storytellers in forwarding the current theories of ethnicity, emphasizing transnational interaction and cross-ethnic cohesion (119). Pyjor also identifies the opportunity to witness the modern approach to black masculinity in Baldwin's novel. He says that the author has provided a new and fresh perspective regarding African American manhood, which is opposite to the firm stereotypes in the reader's mind (Pyjor 3). The scholars have rightly recognized the protagonist's optimistically modern attitude to masculine powers, which were alway...