African American Masculinity and the Study of Social Formations

Abstract

Within the last nine years, black male scholars have produced an impressive body of work on black masculinity and black male sexualities. Here we might think of such scholars as Marcellous Blount, George P. Cunningham, Phillip Brian Harper, E. Patrick Johnson, Dwight McBride, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Maurice Wallace. The recent publications of Martin Summers s Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinityy 1900-1930 and Marlon Ross's Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era provide us with an occasion to reflect on the origins and significance of this interest in black masculinity. Indeed, these texts intervene in the studies of African American culture by interrogating African American intellectual and literary histories as archives of racialized gender and sexual formations. In this way, both texts refuse to read historical or literary archives generically, that is, as sites denuded of differences of race, gender, and sexuality. Rather, these texts present the histories of African American intellectuals as the gendered and sexualized history of the black middle class. As they make the question of African American intellectual history inseparable from the inquiries into black masculinity, the two books illustrate how black manhood in the context of black intellectual formations has historically been a critique of and an appeal to privileges of class and citizenship. For instance, Manliness and Its Discontents is divided into two parts that define these contradictions. The first part, titled Manliness, considers how