Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (review)

At the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, five sessions related to literature and humanities appeared in the program, an increase from only one at the 2007 meeting. The increase may have been related to the AAG's co-sponsorship of a symposium on Geography and the Humanities the previous summer. Both the symposium and the sessions, however, were likely inspired by a larger movement afoot in academia to bring concerns of geography, space, and place together with critiques of representation. The results of this nascent union are writings that disturb the traditional boundaries of academic writing, leading to more robust and nuanced constructions of issues including identity, race, gender, and class. Unfortunately, when scholars incorporate theories and literatures from outside their specialization, there can be a tendency, especially in innovative research, for outcomes that don't necessarily hit their mark.

One such example is Riche Richardson's book Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Richardson's goal is to explore the "typically unrecognized historical and contemporary aspects of black southern masculine representation. . .as they have been manifest in such contexts as literature and film" (p. 19). The representation Richardson is referring to is that of the Southern Black male developed during slavery and the decades following the Civil War, which depicted African American men as hypersexualized (and therefore a threat to white women) and/or ignorant (therefore incapable of governing). Whites constructed these representations in order to justify terrorizing African Americans and keeping them disenfranchised. Richardson maintains these representations, whether embodied as the Black rapist or dancing and shuffling Jim Crow, became tropes that have continually been redeployed in fiction, movies, and music.

Richardson, trained in literature with specializations in southern and African American studies, finds that despite its insights, postmodern theories are insufficient to study questions of southern identity because they privilege the urban. Post-structural cultural geographers, however, with their emphasis on identity as shaped by place, seem more appealing to Richardson. In making her argument Richardson cites the work of several prominent geographers. She draws most heavily, however, on the work of David Sibley and others who incorporate psychoanalytic theory in their work. Richardson is particularly interested in theories of abjection drawn from Julia Kristeva which posit that psychologically, we expel or distance ourselves from things perceived as "impure." The constant threat of contact and contamination with the expelled generates anxiety in the subject. In Richardson's formulation, the African American male is constructed as the abject in the U.S. imaginary. The choice to draw on Sibley is curious because it doesn't include the most compelling aspect of his work, which following Meade, extends the separation of the subject and the abject to the material world (creating the ecological self and the ecological order). Psychoanalytic theory becomes then, a way of understanding how people think about and negotiate abject spaces.

There is little doubt that the Southern Black male possesses abject-like qualities, but the processes that demonized the black subject are just as likely socially constructed for reasons not explained by psychoanalytic theory. Geographer David Jansson for example, has written several articles about the South and Southern identity framed by the concept of internal orientalism.

In Black Masculinity in the South Richardson traces the reproduction of the marginalized Black Southern male in books, films and music. The fact that negative representations of African American males derived from Southern myths get reproduced in fiction and movies like The Clans-man and Birth of a Nation is not that surprising. What is surprising however, and where Richardson excels, is in identifying the way African American authors and filmmakers have internalized and reproduced these Southern myths in their works. Richardson identifies the way that characterizations of Southern Black men, initially developed by whites, have been elaborated by Blacks to condemn those that aren't seen as advancing...