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

Recent years have witnessed tremendous new work on black masculinity. Focusing on the intersections of race and gender construction, scholars such as Maurice Wallace, Marlon Ross, and Mark Anthony Neal have established the critical study of black masculinity as its own discreet area.¹ More or less simultaneously, the new Southern Studies called for by Houston A. Baker and Dana D. Nelson and exemplified by Tara McPherson and others has redirected the study of the South toward national and global contexts, greater recognition of racial diversity, and the denaturing of narrow racial and geographic binaries.² The history of southern racial injustice has been fundamental to explorations of black masculinity and, likewise, works in southern studies have focused on the interplay of race and gender; however, these two fields have largely taken separate, if parallel, courses. With Black Masculinity and the U.S. South, Riché Richardson bridges this gap. Drawing on sources from literature, film, and music, her insightful and well-crafted study is the first monograph to explicitly examine the role of geography in formulating black masculine ideality.

Black Masculinity and the U.S. South argues that, for African Americans, southernness has been an embarrassing quality signifying ignorance, political accommodation, and failed masculinity. As Richardson writes, her goal is to explore "the construal of black male southerners as inferior and undesirable models of black masculinity within [ . . . ] racial hierarchies based on geography" (2–3). Richardson argues that representations of southern black masculinity have limited themselves to the reproduction of two stereotypical images: the Uncle Tom and the black rapist. The Uncle Tom offers a model of asexual and accommodationist black masculinity while its opposite, the black rapist, depicts black men as oversexed and pathological. These two archetypes, Richardson suggests, have not only narrowed the range of black masculine forms in the South, but have governed representations of black men on the national level as well. She accurately points out the utility of these tropes to white men, noting that the construction of white masculinity has depended on the use of supposedly pathological black male bodies as negative referents. Her greater contribution, however, is her assertion that black men, too, have used the South and its stock characters as "a backdrop" (6) for their own gender construction. Indeed, an examination of the South's centrality as a negative referent for masculine formation in the African-American context forms the crux of her study. Focusing on geographic hierarchies, Richardson reveals a binary logic—evident in histories of the rival leaderships of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington—that celebrates northern urban models of black masculinity in opposition to those of the southern and rural. This paradigm bolsters northern masculine scripts at the expense of southern black men, which it codes as inauthentic, cowardly, and counterrevolutionary.

The arguments of Black Masculinity and the U.S. South develop over the course of five chapters, each analyzing disparate sources in light of Richardson's geographic hierarchies. Her first chapter examines the legacy of the racist caricatures employed by early twentieth-century novelist Thomas Dixon and filmmaker D.W. Griffith alongside the challenge to those archetypes evident in the textual and cinematic versions of William Bradford Huie's 1967 novel, The Klansman. Richardson focuses on the 1974 film adaptation's addition of the vengeful black revolutionary Garth, played by O. J. Simpson, and the accompanying shift from the novel's thematic focus on rape to the film's preoccupation with lynching and masculinist retribution. She argues that Garth, who cites riots in northern cities as the inspiration for his recourse to violence, serves to align the film with the tendencies of the Black Power movement and the blaxploitation film genre to associate authentic black masculine resistance with northern urban spaces. Furthermore, she takes the opportunity to link the figure of the black rapist—notoriously represented in Dixon's fiction—to the representations of African-American men as pathological criminals that have surrounded media...