African American Masculinity and the Study of Social Formations

Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930. By Martin Summers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 448 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $21.95 (paper).

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. By Marlon B. Ross. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 464 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper).

Within the last nine years, black male scholars have produced an impressive body of work on black masculinity and black male sexualities. Here we might think of such scholars as Marcellous Blount, George P. Cunningham, Phillip Brian Harper, E. Patrick Johnson, Dwight McBride, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Maurice Wallace. The recent publications of Martin Summers's Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 and Marlon Ross's Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era provide us with an occasion to reflect on the origins and significance of this interest in black masculinity. Indeed, these texts intervene in the studies of African American culture by interrogating African American intellectual and literary histories as archives of racialized gender and sexual formations. In this way, both texts refuse to read historical or literary archives generically, that is, as sites denuded of differences of race, gender, and sexuality. Rather, these texts present the histories of African American intellectuals as the gendered and sexualized history of the black middle class. As they make the question of African American intellectual history inseparable from the inquiries into black masculinity, the two books illustrate how black manhood—in the context of black intellectual formations—has historically been a critique of and an appeal to privileges of class and citizenship.

For instance, Manliness and Its Discontents is divided into two parts that define these contradictions. The first part, titled "Manliness," considers how early black fraternal, civic, and political organizations produced and negotiated Victorian ideals of manhood, using those ideals to frame the meanings of black agency in the twentieth century. In "Discontent," the second part of the book, Summers deftly uses the histories of young black male artists and college students who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s as a way to mark the contestation of the very Victorian gender norms of the preceding generation and to denote a shift in the meanings of black middle-class masculinity. Similarly, Manning the Race considers the racially gendered constrictions of Jim Crow society and the heterogeneous emergence of black masculinity, an emergence denoted not only through corporeal practices, but through intellectual and aesthetic ones as well. In part 1 of the book, Ross frames black migration as an aesthetic and literary engagement with and production of the New Negro male body. In part 2, Ross considers how black male bodies negotiated political organizations and social networks made up of blacks and whites as well as men and women, reading those bodies as the surface for unprecedented biracial encounters in the early twentieth century. Part 3 interrogates the ways in which black male corporeality inspired aesthetic innovations among the urban folk novelists of the Harlem Renaissance.

We cannot understand the rise of scholarship evidenced by Manning the Race and Manliness and Its Discontents without first trying to historicize black queer intellectual formations within the American academy. To begin with, we might situate the emergence of black queer intellectual formations within the epistemological possibilities and limitations of queer, gay and lesbian, ethnic, and women's studies. Indeed, black queer intellectuals partly hail out of an academic world in which the study of queer sexualities has been institutionally enabled and authorized by queer studies and gay and lesbian studies. But the presence of those intellectuals also marks the failure of queer studies and women's studies as critical enterprises in that they deal insufficiently with epistemological and institutional matters of race. The history of black queer intellectuals within the academy also underlines the limits...