American Boy Tour is a project that explores the identity of masculinity in America. Aaron Douglas, photographer, and Keelyn Bradley, writer/filmmaker, travel across the United States and parts of Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean in search of what it means to be a “man” in the 21st century. What could be more American than two single, young men traveling “the open road” (metaphorically speaking; of course we will be utilizing many modes of transportation) to document some familiar and many not so familiar images and stories that tell about the lives of common, everyday men—of many different kinds of appearance, intellect, feeling, belief, culture, and history?
The theme of journeying across the North American landscape, to grasp some deeper meaning of a man’s place in the often clichéd “American Dream” conjures up thoughts of Jack Kerouac’s seminal work of postwar, mid-century American fiction, the novel On the Road (1957). Setting out for a road trip across the continent that begins in 1947 with a drive from New York City to Chicago, the novel’s male protagonist, Sal Paradise, along with a group of men and women he meets during the journey, test the limits of human determination by living out an ethos of now-time. This newfound freedom, however, is afflicted with a mixture of wonder and disillusionment that we now understand (nearly four decades after its publication) represents the profound sorrow of the 60’s generation that held it up as a mirror of their social discontent.
Like the irony Kerouac intimates with the last-name of his male protagonist, Paradise, the freedom advanced by the identity politics of the 60’s movements: Civil Rights/Human Rights, Black Power, Feminism/Womanism, Chicano-a, American Indian, Pan-African, Pan-Asian, Queer/LGBT (to name those most emblematic of the era) is as much about equality as it is about the American obsession with place. In fact, the very definition of identity depends on a sense of place, one’s own relation to a time and space in relation to others—difference. While the 60’s identity politics may have changed basic modern assumptions and established conventions of social order, the idea of place or counter-place still remained a part of the critiques of American ideology. One could say that though each of these movements challenged the notion that the “American Dream” was a perfectly formulated paradigm, by holding up their experiences to see to what extent the dream image was or wasn’t a reflection of their reality, they only slightly altered its appearance; but, it still occupies a place in the American imagination.
Despite all the doctor-like pronouncements of the “death of identity politics” and the recent heralding in of the “post-feminist” and “post-racial” eras—marked by the milestones of Hilary Clinton (the first woman candidate to “really” have a chance at breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ to become President of the United States) and the election of Barack Hussein Obama (the first African American President)—the American obsession with place does not allow us to move away from a discussion of identity. We can look to what is loosely being called “the birthers’ movement” (a desperate group of demented Americans who believe Obama’s original place of birth is somewhere other than U.S….possibly Kenya) as an example, however resistible it might be, of American anxiety sparked by a cultural change. Outraged, many liberals have brought attention to the veiled racism of such absurdity, pointing out that Obama was in fact born in Hawaii and bringing up the old news that not much ado was ever made about John McCain (aka “ The Maverick”) being born in Panama and therefore technically being a foreigner.
With an exorbitant amount of focus on Obama’s obvious blackness as Africaness, even these liberal admissions of racist fantasy, to say something about racial politics that is still very much needed (that racism is a sleeping dog ready to bite the first trespasser within reach of its chain link), reduce racism to black and white terms. In this multicultural /multiethnic/ multiracial/multinational/nondenominational world of Obama, Tiger Woods, digitization, and globalism, binaries (at least to the majority of us non-computer programmers who are unversed in the language of 0’s and 1’s) are easily dismissible as relics of the analog world. Overlooking how our elliptical vision of Hawaii (as somewhere between Queen Liliuokalani, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, South Pacific-the musical and the film, Hawaii Five-O, and Fantasy Island) affects our image of President Obama as the first black man to be “leader of the free world” ignores the internal conflict represented by the “American Dream.”
Obama’s interracial/multiethnic/transnational identity represents something that is not new to America but everything that is quintessentially American. As a man of interracial parentage who identifies as African American, he represents something about America that we as Americans have for so long denied—our interracial and intercultural identity. He is not, however, from any place we immediately associate with blackness (neither the urban black America coming through our television nor the rural black South we remember along with the racial segregation of the past). In this way, as a thought that no one dares speak but nevertheless surfaces like a stream of consciousness moment coming from the blahblahblah of one-note, extreme right-wing, political commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Obama represents America’s shame as much as its hope. Perhaps for the same reason that he was overwhelming elected to office, because of his all-American appeal, we (those of us who fantasize that he is foreign and even those of us who fixate on him as if he is the final realization of Martin Luther King’s dream) cannot move beyond our sorrow over the loss of so many men who look just like him—to poverty, prison, drugs, violence, and AIDS.
By traveling across North America and parts of the Caribbean to ask two simple questions: What is the all-American man? What is the American Dream?, the American Boy Tour might get at something more about what it means to be a man in the 21st century. How do we understand masculinity in terms of questions about race; gender; ethnicity; culture; sexuality; self-image; class status, etc.? These questions are not meant to present a grand narrative about American culture and society but rather a point of departure. There will be other, multiple points of departure as we make sense of the values, symbols, and images that define masculinity. Our journey to cities and towns, large and small, will not be a seamless path from one point to the next. There will be breaks between cities and time-lapses in production. The ticket is free. Join us.
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