Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature PDF Download

Author: Jeffrey B. Leak
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572333574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The portrayal of black men in our national literature is controversial, complex, and often contradictory."In Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, Jeffrey B. Leak identifies some of the long-held myths and stereotypes that persist in the work of black writers from the nineteenth century to the present--intellectual inferiority, criminality, sexual prowess, homosexual emasculation, and cultural deprivation. Utilizing Robert B. Stepto's call-and-response theory, Leak studies four pairs of novels within the context of certain myths, identifying the literary tandems between them and seeking to discover the source of our culture's psychological preoccupation with black men. Calling upon interdisciplinary fields of study--literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, legal theory, and queer theory--Leak offers ground breaking analysis of both canonical texts (representing the "call" of the call-and-response dyad) and texts by emerging writers (representing the "response"), including Frederick Douglass and Charles Johnson: Ralph Ellison and Brent Wade; Richard Wright and Ernest J. Gaines; and Toni Morrison and David Bradley. Though Leak does not claim that the "response" tests are superior to the "call' texts, he does argue that, in some cases, the newer work--such as charles Johnson's "Oxherding Tale--can address a theme or offer a narrative innovation not found in preceding texts, such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. In these instances, argues Leak, the newer texts constitute not only a response to the call text, but a substantial revision. Leak offers the first in-depth criticism of black masculinity in a range of literary texts. In a final chapter, he expands his discussion to the emerging field of black masculinity studies, pointing to future directions for study, including memoir, film, drama, and others. Poised on the brink of exciting new trends in scholarship, "Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature is flagship work, enhancing the understanding of literary constructions of black masculinity and the larger cultural imperatives to which these writers are reacting.

Author: Josef Benson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442237619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Issues of race, gender, women’s rights, masculinity, and sexuality continue to be debated on the national scene. These subjects have also been in the forefront of American literature, particularly in the last fifty years. One significant trend in contemporary fiction has been the failure of the heroic masculine protagonist. In Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, andJames Baldwin,Josef Benson examines key literary works of the twentieth century, notably Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), Song of Solomon (1977), and Another Country (1960). Benson argues that exaggerated masculinities originated on the American frontier and have transformed into a definition of ideal masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. Defined by violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia, these men concocted or perpetuated myths about African Americans to justify their mistreatment and mass murder of black men after Reconstruction. As Benson illustrates, the protagonists in these texts fail to perpetuate hypermasculinities, and as a result a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. Offering a unique and bold argument that connects the masculinities of cowboys and frontier figures with black males, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel suggests alternative possibilities for American men going forward. Scholars and students of American literature and culture, African American literature and culture, and queer and gender theory will find this book illuminating and persuasive.

Author: Sarah Wienand
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783656621553
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: Throughout many years, African Americans have been struggling in defining and constructing their identity, especially male African Americans had problems to build up self-esteem and to reassure their cultural masculinity, which was undermined by white men. Not only does history confirm this struggle but so does literature. In liter-ature, many different aspects about male black identity and their struggle for identity can be found. However, one of the most important authors in this context is Langston Hughes. In his works, he focuses on the urban life of African Americans and the problems they had to face because of oppression and racism evoked by white Americans. Furthermore, Hughes wanted "to record and interpret the lives of the common black folk, their thoughts and habits and dreams, their struggle for political freedom and economic well-being" (Jemie: 1). By doing so in his writings, he took this struggle for and negotiation of racial identity to another level in developing a unique form of expression. In this thesis, I will concentrate on three major works by Langston Hughes: Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, "Simple speaks his mind" and Not without laughter. All three texts display emotional conflicts and the struggle for identity of African American men with "simplicity and depth" (Tidwell: 3). Furthermore, all three pro-tagonists have a rather low status in society, which contributes, according to Lang-ston Hughes, to their authenticity since they are the ones who represent the African American and thus their pursuit of identity (cf. Tidwell: 3). Moreover, I am going to begin with a general overview of the male black identity and the struggle for an African American male perspective in a culture which is dom-inated by white American men. Afterwards, I will transfer this concept of m

Author: Don Belton
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807009376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Including the work of Derrick Bell, Trey Ellis, Haki Madhubuti, Clarence Major, Walter Mosley, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and August Wilson, among others, Speak My Name explores the intimate territory behind the myths about black masculinity.

Author: Daniel Y. Kim
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book is a comparative study of African American and Asian American representations of masculinity and race, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin.

Author: Chong Chon-Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626745250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and Black men, confronting this important white stratagem to secure class and racial privilege, wealth, and status in the post-civil rights era. Indeed, Asian and Black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional. Through this opposition in the US racial hierarchy, Chong Chon-Smith argues that Asian and Black men are positioned along binaries brain/body, diligent/lazy, nerd/criminal, culture/genetics, student/convict, and technocrat/athlete—in what he terms “racial magnetism.” Via this concept, East Meets Black traces the national conversations that oppose Black and Asian masculinities, but also the Afro-Asian counterpoints in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures. Chon-Smith highlights the spectacle and performance of baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki within global multiculturalism and the racially coded controversy between Yao Ming and Shaquille O'Neal in transnational basketball. Further, he assesses the prominence of martial arts buddy films such as Romeo Must Die and Rush Hour that produce Afro-Asian solidarity in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Finally, Chon-Smith explores how the Afro-Asian cultural fusions in hip-hop open up possibilities for the creation of alternative subcultures, to disrupt myths of Black pathology and the Asian model minority. In this first interdisciplinary book on Asian and Black masculinities in literature and popular culture, Chon-Smith explores the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which the formation of Asian and Black racial masculinity has affected contemporary America.

Author: Joseph Vogel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American men in popular culture
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
"Myths about the racial other have been crucial to the American imaginary, particularly in the construction of white masculinity. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how and why the specter of the 'rising tide of color,' a term borrowed from racial anthropologist Lothrop Stoddard, resurfaces so often in American literature, film and media. The Rising Tide of Color focuses specifically on the discursive relationship between white masculinity and black masculinity. While much of the recent literature on the crisis in white masculinity reads it as unique to the Obama era (or at least the postcivil rights era), I show how it has always been intertwined with anxieties about blackness (and black masculinity in particular). The myth of the threatening black male reappears again and again in American discourse, from fears about slave insurrections to terror about miscegenation in The Birth of a Nation; from Tom Buchanan's dread of racial infiltration in The Great Gatsby, to civil rights era apprehensions about black power, to present-day anxieties about Barack Obama's legitimacy as president of the United States. Through close, contextualized readings of novels, films, music videos and media narratives, I demonstrate how panic and pushback in response to the rising tide of color has been deployed strategically to safeguard white supremacy and the American ideal of manhood. Drawing on a selection of African American scholars, authors and artists, I also show how such myths have been resisted, contested and re-imagined. The Rising Tide of Color is organized by pairing related texts and moments in American history, demonstrating how histories are layered rather than sequential and how myths--in this case, the myth of the rising tide of color--resurface in new contexts. Chapter One draws on James Baldwin's essay 'Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood' (1985) to examine how the Reagan-era ideal of aggressive, 'hard-body' white masculinity was revived in popular culture and how it was challenged by the emergence of a 'New Pop Cinema,' characterized by queer visions of race and masculinity. Chapter Two shifts to the 1990s, analyzing how Michael Jackson's controversial short film, Black or White (1991), can be read as both a response to its cultural moment (including the brutal beating of Rodney King), as well as a revision of the American 'origin story' presented in Hollywood's founding film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Chapter Three moves to the Obama era, exploring how Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) revives many of the myths and anxieties about slave rebellion that troubled William Styron's controversial civil rights era novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Finally, in Chapter Four, I delineate how discourse about white panic in The Great Gatsby (1925) persists in the Age of Obama, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age classic has reemerged as a bestselling book and blockbuster film directed by Baz Luhrmann"--Pages v-vi.

Author: Judith Kegan Gardiner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231504911
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Why is there so much talk of a "crisis" of masculinity? How have ideas of manhood been transformed by feminism? Does feminism hold the key to the development of more egalitarian forms of masculinity? Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory addresses central questions about the analysis and construction of masculinity in contemporary society. The volume examines the ways male privilege and power are constituted and represented and explores the effect of such constructions on both men and women. With subjects ranging from Robert Bly ́s Iron John to Tom Hank ́s "niceness," this collection overturns old paradigms about identity, victimization, and dominant and alternative forms of masculinity to advance new dialogues between masculinity studies and feminist theory. Looking particularly at literature, film, and classroom practices, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory links the analysis of masculinities with feminism ́s ethical and political agenda for the future. Its authors share a conviction that such a link not only reveals the persistence, now more subtle and varied, of male entitlement but also promises to create an enriched and reinvigorated feminism for a new century. Why is there so much talk of a "crisis" of masculinity? How have ideas of manhood been transformed by feminism? Does feminism hold the key to the development of more egalitarian forms of masculinity? Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory addresses central questions about the analysis and construction of masculinity in contemporary society. The volume examines the ways male privilege and power are constituted and represented and explores the effect of such constructions on both men and women. With subjects ranging from Robert Bly's Iron John to Tom Hank's "niceness," this collection overturns old paradigms about identity, victimization, and dominant and alternative forms of masculinity to advance new dialogues between masculinity studies and feminist theory. Looking particularly at literature, film, and classroom practices, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory links the analysis of masculinities with feminism's ethical and political agenda for the future. Its authors share a conviction that such a link not only reveals the persistence, now more subtle and varied, of male entitlement but also promises to create an enriched and reinvigorated feminism for a new century.

Author: Lydia R. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000504956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Author: Susan Neal Mayberry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Taking a close look at all the key male figures in Toni Morrison’s eight novels, this book explores Morrison’s admitted, but critically neglected, interest in the relationships between African American men and women and the “axes” on which these relationships turn. Most Morrison scholarship deals with her female characters.Can’t I Love What I Criticize?offers a response to this imbalance and to Morrison’s call for more work on men, who remain, in her words, “outside of that little community value thing.” The book also considers the barriers between black men and women thrown up by their participation in a larger, historically racist culture of competition, ownership, sexual repression, and fixed ideals about physical beauty and romantic love. Black women, Morrison says, bear their crosses “extremely well,” and black men, although they have been routinely emasculated by “white men, period,” have managed to maintain a feisty “magic” that everybody wants but nobody else has. Understanding Morrison’s treatment of her male characters, says Susan Mayberry, becomes crucial to grasping her success in “countering the damage done by a spectrum of sometimes misguided isms”--including white American feminism. Morrison’s version of masculinity suggests that black men have “successfully retained their special vitality in spite of white male resistance” and that “their connections to black women have saved their lives.” To single out her men is not to negate the preeminence of her women; rather, it is to recognize the interconnectedness and balance between them.