La «couleur noire» dans le panorama littéraire québécois: la parodie de race et de sexe dans l’œuvre de Dany Laferrière

Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality. The obsession has to do with a search for stimulation and meaning in a fast-paced, market-driven culture; the fear is rooted in visceral feelings about black bodies fuelled by sexual myths of black women and men. Hooks argues that "images of black men as rapists, as dangerous menaces to society, have been sensational cultural currency for some time," further noting that "the obsessive media focus on these representations is political". In fact, the role such pervasive and deleterious images play in the maintenance of racist domination is to convince the public that black men are a dangerous threat who must be controlled by any means necessary, including annihilation. In this paper, I address American constructions of black masculinity in Dany Laferrière's novels. His retheorizations of America and American identities are important to understanding his plays on stereotypes of black masculinity within the American racial "desiring machine", a term that I borrow from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. This writer places his own narrative squarely within this vexed cultural, historical, capital, and racial nexus - in other words, at the heart of the racial problematic in America, even if Laferrière's representations of le nègre enter into stereotype precisely in order to parody, hyperbolize, and ultimately, pervert it.