Manliness & Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class & the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (review)

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States possessed a hegemonic, Victorian definition of masculinity that made invisible, or defined as "negative referents," African American and African Caribbean men. Reverberating against this definition, Martin Summers in Manliness & Its Discontents reconfigures the gender identities of middle-class black men during the first three decades of the century. In Manliness, Summers focuses on four distinct groups: black men who comprised the Prince Hall Freemasonry and United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), black youth who came of age during and after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, and black youth on black college campuses. He examines how middle-class black men engaged in gender formation in relation to, and in tension with, the changing hegemonic definition of masculinity. They "imagined and performed a gendered self in a number of different sites, through a number of different modalities (work, leisure, cultural production, organizational life, love and sex) . . . and within a web of relations" (290). Summers explores middle-class black male gender formation within the context of Judith Butler, who defines gender not as something essential or biological but as a process. Gender is "socially defined, constantly reproduced through the social meaning of language, and embedded with specific economic, political, and cultural institutions" (9).

In Part I, "Manliness," Summers presents a detailed examination of the Freemasonry and UNIA, discussing how these organizations, through their various social, political, and economic activities, articulated a gendered self. Reproducing the Victorian ideals of masculinity, they allowed middle-class black men to construct their "gender identities within the paradigms of providership, production, and respectability" (26). With an emphasis on racial consciousness, they believed in self-control of one's emotions and desires, and the patriarchal responsibility of participating in politics and business, also positioning themselves against women and youth. In a fascinating re-reading of Marcus Garvey, Summers demonstrates how Garvey reproduced this dominant bourgeois ideal of manhood. With his "back to Africa" movement, he emphasized the importance of frontier and the mastery of self and environment, as well as believing in the self-made man.

In parallel with the changes in American middle-class society, middle-class African American men, who came of age during and after World War I, resisted late-Victorian social conventions of manliness and began to usher in more modern notions of masculinity. For these young black men, manhood was defined through the presentation of the body and the immersion in consumer culture.

But it was the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age, who belonged to the emerging modern culture, that challenged radically traditional notions of manhood. Examining the personal lives and the works of Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman (and especially in his brilliant and insightful readings of Toomer's Cane and McKay's Home to Harlem and Banana Bottom), Summers charts the emergence of different models of masculinity. These writers and artists explored openly homosexuality and sexual fluidity, living jazz culture, which created non-bourgeois leisure spaces. There was the emergence of "sweetback," a man who dressed in flashy clothes, loafed in poolrooms, in dance halls, and speakeasies. He never worked, but, totally immersed in consumer culture, always had plenty of money for liquor and gambling. In addition, these young writers and artists challenged traditional marriage. Wallace Thurman's marriage to Louise Thompson failed because he was not ready to give up his bohemian lifestyle, while Countee Cullen struggled between entering a conventional union with a woman and pursuing his desire to have intimate, sexual relationships with men. "The bohemian lifestyle," writes Summers, "that typified the youthful jazz culture was antithetical to bourgeois manliness in its rejection of the market place . . . and in its encouragement of excessive consumption" (198).

Likewise, the middle-class, young black men who occupied...