Book excerpt: Mutilated, dying or dead, black men play a role in the psychic life of culture. From national dreams to media fantasies, from sensual intimacy to outpourings of murderous violence, there is a persistent imagining of what black men must be, a demand that black men perform a script, becomeinterchangeable with the uncanny, deeply unsettling, projections of culture. This powerful and compelling study explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. David Marriott draws upon a range of examples, from lynching photographs to recent Hollywood films, as well as the ideas of keythinkers including Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and John Edgar Wideman, to reveal a vicious pantomime of unvarying reification and compulsive fascination, of whites taking a look at themselves through images of black desolation, and of blacks intimately dispossessed by that self-samelooking. On Black Men is a bold and original exploration of what it means to be black and male in contemporary Europe and America.