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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been supported at various junctures of this book’s development by people in and beyond the academy. It has been a privilege to live and work in intellectual community at the University of California, Davis, with such interlocutors as Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Gregory Dobbins, Jon Rossini, Michael Ziser, Desirée Martín, Seeta Chaganti, Claire Waters, Katherine Sugg, and Bishnupriya Ghosh, all of whom I owe thanks for their thoughtful and incisive readings of sections of this book. Other colleagues at UC Davis whose ideas and suggestions at various junctures undoubtedly helped to make this a better book include Patricia A. Turner, Clarence E. Walker, Jacob Olupona, Carl Jorgensen, Clarence Major, David Van Leer, Karl Zender, David Simpson, and Linda Morris. Peter Hays reminded me early on to confront the example of the black rapist as a historical stereotype of black masculinity in the South. This book has benefited from the diligent and methodical research skills of Eden Osucha, Tara Pedersen, and Hana Fujimoto. I appreciate Kara Thompson’s compilation of the index. I have also found intellectual stimulation and support in ongoing dialogues with Roy Kamada and Andrew Strombeck. I am thankful for the support and advice that Georges Van Den Abbeele and Ron Saufley at the Davis Humanities Institute gave so freely as I drafted research proposals and made applications for fellowships; their support of the project, particularly in its early phases when I was a new faculty member, was heartening. I also extend thanks to them and to John Van Den Heuvel and the 2002–3 DHI fellows for such a stimulating year of discussion on “The Poetics and Politics of Place.” I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated in an interdisciplinary research cluster on masculinity for a year at UC Davis, which allowed me to dissect and digest some of the most interesting and innovative scholarship in the field with scholars who were also developing projects on the topic. Judith Newton was particularly helpful as I developed the sections on the black-liberation movement, including the Black Panther Party and her namesake—Huey. For support of this project from its early phases as a dissertation in the fabled English department at Duke University, I thank Karla FC Holloway, Cathy N. Davidson, Wahneema Lubiano, and Thomas Ferraro, whose counsel helped me as I searched out critical and theoretical foundations ix for this study and enabled me to stack the building blocks much more efficiently and creatively. I also appreciate Nahum Chandler’s work on my dissertation committee as well as his sponsorship during the year that I spent at Johns Hopkins University in the Program for Comparative American Cultures. Furthermore, I owe thanks to Michael Moon, Lee Baker, David Barry Gaspar, and Paula Giddings. I cannot discuss the Duke roots of this project without mentioning various others working in and beyond the field of African American literary studies whose dialogues impacted my development as an intellectual. Among them are Shireen Lewis, Maurice Wallace, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Sarah Willburn, and Scott Trafton. I also appreciate the support and generosity of C. T. Woods-Powell and Richard Powell. I’ve yet to see or experience intellectual community in the profession anywhere else in the way that I have experienced it among my colleagues and friends in southern studies. I particularly appreciate the support that I have been given by Jon Smith, Leigh Anne Duck, Scott Romine, Kathryn McKee , Annette Trefzer, George Handley, Deborah Cohn, Katherine Henninger , Robert Phillips, and John Lowe as I have completed this book. Houston A. Baker Jr.’s methodologies have widened the space for critical study of black masculinity and the U.S. South, and I have valued his support. The feedback of Marlon Ross and Richard Yarborough was also useful and arrived when I really needed it. I valued the opportunity to participate in a dialogue with Hortense Spillers about her rich body of work in psychoanalysis during my development of this study. Funding from various sources enabled the development and completion of this project, including a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship that gave me necessary leave time to write, a New Faculty Research Grant, a Faculty Development Award, a Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship, and a Faculty Research Grant. This book has been shaped inestimably over the years by conversations I’ve had in sessions at meetings sponsored by the Modern Language Association, the Collegium for African American Research , the American Studies Association, and the Society for...

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