Making Mandingo: Racial Archetypes, Pornography, and Black Male Subjectivity

Abstract

Mandingo is a reference to a longstanding myth in American culture, that black men have an unquenchable desire for white woman. I will argue that Mandingo is an example of a racial archetype. Racial archetypes are specific images of a long-standing stereotypes. Mandingo is one such archetype. Mandingo conjures up an entire history of the rhetoric of miscegenation. For some it is the excitement of the big black cock (BBC) and crossing the color line, but for most blacks it invokes images of lynching, slavery, and police brutality brought on by the fear of black men while at the same time trafficking in a prurient landscape of American racial and sexual relations. Whether through words, pictures or movies, the Mandingo has become a dominant archetype in the pantheon of the African American experience. Charting the Mandingo emergence and articulation is critical project to discern how these rhetorical markers are part of a larger mythic narrative. With this in mind, I am interested in the ways in which competing racial and gendered myths and archetypes emerge and circulate within the semi-public rhetorical space of pornography. The image of the well-hung black man circulates through all forms of Western media; print, photograph, televisual, and digital. These images fill a particular void in the American racial narrative because it gives the public a framework to understand and decode black maleness with very real consequences.