Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

by Ronda C. Henry Anthony
Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

by Ronda C. Henry Anthony

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Overview

HOW WOMEN'S BODIES FUNCTION WITHIN PRODUCTIONS OF IDEAL AND PROGRESSIVE BLACK MASCULINITIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, the author shows how black men's struggles for gendered agency are inextricably bound up with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which this study couches these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize identity. Yet, Henry Anthony quickly moves to texts that challenge traditional constructions of black masculinity. In these texts she traces how the emergence of collaboratively gendered discourses, or a blending of black female/male feminist consciousnesses, are reshaping black masculinities, femininities, and intraracial relations for a new century.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781628461800
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Publication date: 09/01/2014
Series: Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ronda C. Henry Anthony, Indianapolis, Indiana, is associate professor of English and Africana studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Searching for the "New Black Man"? From Masculine Ideality to Progressive Black Masculinities 3

Chapter 1 Dominant versus Subordinate Masculinities and the Gendered Oppositions between Slavery and Freedom 21

Chapter 2 Unsexing the Black Girl to Get to the Indian Princess The Production of Talented-Tenth Black Masculine Power and the Cleansing and Transcending of Black (Wo)Manhood in W. E. B. Du Bois 54

Chapter 3 "What's Love Got to Do with It?" James Baldwin, Cross-Racial/Sexual Bond(age)ing, and the Cult of Hegemonic Black Masculinity 99

Chapter 4 Breakin' the Rules Socrates Fortlow, Ethics, and Walter Mosley's Constructions of Progressive Black Masculinities 127

Chapter 5 Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, the Economies of Respectable Black Manhood and Leadership, and the Politics of Collaboratively Gendered Black Male Feminist Autobiography 151

Notes 179

Works Cited 184

Index 189

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