In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century; Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life; work; leisure; and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation; Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation; rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires.Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus: the fraternal order of Prince Hall Freemasonry; the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association; or the Garvey movement; the modernist circles of the Harlem Renaissance; and the campuses of historically black Howard and Fisk Universities. Between 1900 and 1930; Summers argues; dominant notions of what it meant to be a man within the black middle class changed from a Victorian ideal of manliness--characterized by the importance of producer values; respectability; and patriarchy--to a modern ethos of masculinity; which was shaped more by consumption; physicality; and sexuality. Summers evaluates the relationships between black men and black women as well as relationships among black men themselves; broadening our understanding of the way that gender works along with class; sexuality; and age to shape identities and produce relationships of power.
#1539582 in Books The University of North Carolina Press 1999-05-31 1999-05-31Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.25 x .68 x 6.13l; .90 #File Name: 0807848034272 pages
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