Description
Book SynopsisA major rethinking of the issues around African American masculinity, tracing its relation to images of construction, and applying ideas from Eve Sedgwick's 'Epistemology of the Closet'.
Trade Review“A most impressive interrogation into the problematic of black masculine identity as it has manifested in the U.S. context from the late eighteenth century through the present day. Readers from across a range of disciplines will be uniformly impressed by the scope and dexterity of Wallace’s critical intelligence. This is an overwhelmingly admirable achievement and a very important book.”—Phillip Brian Harper, author of
Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity“Highly original and deeply probing in its analyses into the intricacies of its topic,
Constructing the Black Masculine is a timely and rewarding addition to the study of African American literature, American studies, and race and sexuality. Maurice O. Wallace has a lot to teach.”—Nellie McKay, coeditor of
The Norton Anthology of African American LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Spectagraphia
1. On Dangers Seen and Unseen: Identity Politics and the Burden of Black Male Specularity
Part Two: No Hiding Place
2. “Are We Men?”: Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Black Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865
3. Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography
4. A Man’s Place: Architecture, Identity, and Black Masculine Being
Part Three: Looking B(l)ack
5. “I’m Not Entirely What I Look Like”: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the Hegemony of Vision; or Jimmy’s FBEye Blues
6. What Juba Knew: Dance and Desire in Melvin Dixon’s
Vanishing Room Afterword: “What Ails you Polyphemus?”: Toward a New Ontology of Vision in Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skin White Masks Notes
Bibliography
Index
