Dismantling Black Manhood

Dismantling Black Manhood PDF Author: Daniel P. Black
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136789812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book examines the social, economic, and cultural factors that have produced the current crisis in African American masculinity, tracing the development of concepts of manhood from pre-colonial West Africa through the Emancipation Proclamation in America. The study begins with an exploration of the cultural context of manhood and the social development of boys into men in West Africa which was based on the rites of passage and the mastery of such social skills as hunting and farming. Enslavement annihilated this unambiguous social status. Denied the possibility of fulfilling the necessary social roles of warrior, husband, father, and protector, African men were forced to redefine manhood, without the benefit of communal discussions. Hence, manhood to many enslaved African American men became an increasingly ambiguous and elusive concept, coupled with problematic notions of sexual performance, absolute patriarchal domination of the household, and the devaluation of commitments that impinge upon a man's independence. Narratives written between 1794 and 1863 reveal that by the end of slavery the concept had become a source of major conflict for African American men. This unique study focuses on the deterioration of the black male concept of manhood in 19th-century America and explores the dilemma of what it means to be black and male in America.

Dismantling Black Manhood

Dismantling Black Manhood PDF Author: Daniel P. Black
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136789812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the social, economic, and cultural factors that have produced the current crisis in African American masculinity, tracing the development of concepts of manhood from pre-colonial West Africa through the Emancipation Proclamation in America. The study begins with an exploration of the cultural context of manhood and the social development of boys into men in West Africa which was based on the rites of passage and the mastery of such social skills as hunting and farming. Enslavement annihilated this unambiguous social status. Denied the possibility of fulfilling the necessary social roles of warrior, husband, father, and protector, African men were forced to redefine manhood, without the benefit of communal discussions. Hence, manhood to many enslaved African American men became an increasingly ambiguous and elusive concept, coupled with problematic notions of sexual performance, absolute patriarchal domination of the household, and the devaluation of commitments that impinge upon a man's independence. Narratives written between 1794 and 1863 reveal that by the end of slavery the concept had become a source of major conflict for African American men. This unique study focuses on the deterioration of the black male concept of manhood in 19th-century America and explores the dilemma of what it means to be black and male in America.

The Man-Not

The Man-Not PDF Author: Tommy J. Curry
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439914869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Before Columbus Foundation 2018 Winner of the AMERICAN BOOK AWARD Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore,is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines. Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.

Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence PDF Author: David Ikard
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Can black males offer useful insights on black women and patriarchy? Many black feminists are doubtful. Their skepticism derives in part from a history of explosive encounters with black men who blamed feminism for stigmatizing black men and undermining racial solidarity and in part from a perception that black male feminists are opportunists capitalizing on the current popularity of black women's writing and criticism. In Breaking the Silence, David Ikard goes boldly to the crux of this debate through a series of provocative readings of key African American texts that demonstrate the possibility and value of a viable black male feminist perspective. Seeking to advance the primary objectives of black feminism, Ikard provides literary models from Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog that consciously wrestle with the concept of victim status for black men and women. He looks at how complicity across gender lines, far from rooting out patriarchy in the black community, has allowed it to thrive. This complicity, Ikard explains, is a process by which victimized groups invest in victim status to the point that they unintentionally concede power to their victimizers and engage in patterns of behavior that are perceived as revolutionary but actually reinforce the status quo. While black feminism has fostered important and necessary discussions regarding the problems of patriarchy within the black community, little attention has been paid to the intersecting dynamics of complicity. By laying bare the nexus between victim status and complicity in oppression, Breaking the Silence charts a new direction for conceptualizing black women's complex humanity and provides the foundations for more expansive feminist approaches to resolving intraracial gender conflicts.

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South PDF Author: David Stefan Doddington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Highlights competing masculine values in slave communities and reveals how masculinity shaped resistance, accommodation, and survival.

Manhood Enslaved

Manhood Enslaved PDF Author: Kenneth Edward Marshall
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580463932
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three male captives to bring greater intellectual and historical clarity to the muted lives of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century central New Jersey, where blacks were held in bondage for nearly two centuries. The book contributes to an evolving body of historical scholarship arguing that the lives of bondpeople in America were shaped not only by the powerful forces of racial oppression, but also by their own notions of gender. The book uses previously understudied, white-authored, nineteenth-century literature about central New Jersey slaves as a point of departure. Reading beyond the racist assumptions of the authors, it contends that the precarious day-to-day existence of the three protagonists -- Yombo Melick, Dick Melick, and Quamino Buccau (Smock) -- provides revealing evidence about the various elements of "slave manhood" that gave real meaning to their oppressed lives. Kenneth E. Marshall is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Slavery, Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820-1860

Slavery, Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820-1860 PDF Author: Jeffrey C. Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135516162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
This dissertation examines the cultural and educational history of central Missouri between 1820 and 1860, and in particular, the issue of master-slave relationships and how they affected education (broadly defined as the transmission of Southern culture). Although Missouri had one of the lowest slave populations during the Antebellum period, Central Missouri - or what became known as Little Dixie - had slave percentages that rivaled many regions and counties of the Deep South. However, slaves and slave owners interacted on a regular basis, which affected cultural transmission in the areas of religion, work, and community. Generally, slave owners in Little Dixie showed a pattern of paternalism in all these areas, but the slaves did not always accept their masters' paternalism, and attempted to forge a life of their own.

Scripting the Black Masculine Body

Scripting the Black Masculine Body PDF Author: Ronald L. Jackson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791466256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in hip-hop music and film.

Manliness and Its Discontents

Manliness and Its Discontents PDF Author: Martin Summers
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080786417X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
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.

Manhood Restored

Manhood Restored PDF Author: Eric Mason
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
ISBN: 1433679949
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
New church voice Eric Mason addresses the cultural and spiritual crises within manhood head-on, presenting a gospel-centered vision that points men back to God's original intent for their lives.

Rethinking Rufus

Rethinking Rufus PDF Author: Thomas A. Foster
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820355224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus-who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated-historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.