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Conclusion Post-race and Post-gender Fiction in a Violent World The men were born during or in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In the postwar world that lay before them, they lived through enormous social and cultural transformations. Lingering on or just beneath the surface those changes announced the complex interplay of race and gender. In many notable historical moments men’s decisions and actions offered competing visions of humanity: one advanced the hopes and dreams for peace, justice, and freedom around the world, and the other undermined and compromised the value of human life on a global scale. In the decisions and actions that shape the course of human events, violence was an important resource upon which men draw. In and around historical events and the ensuing international changes, the men of this book proceeded to live their lives. At times they were drawn directly into larger historical moments of change and conflicts, despite their positioning at the margins or exclusions of those changes. More often than not, when momentous events swirled around them, they were seemingly oblivious to historical linkages that impacted their daily lives. Regardless, the men’s lives were by no means detached from the larger historical debates and responses that shape human relations. History reflects the cumulative decisions and actions of all human beings. The men’s smaller narratives in comparison were intricately linked to the larger historical accounting of what happened in human events. Fundamental to that accounting was the role that race, gender, and violence played in shaping the contours of human life, for which the men’s lives offered no particular exception. In the ever-unfolding process of becoming, each man traveled along his own arduous path, as his life was created and recreated by circumstance for which he had little control. Despite this, each actively participated in the making of his own personal histories. The men asserted agency, and their decisions and actions vividly revealed the tensions, dilemmas, and contradictions embedded in their experiences. In the complex coexistence between agency 227 and structural arrangements, the decisions the men made and the actions taken occurred under conditions that shaped the choices, options, and opportunities available to them. Their experiences revealed what happened when decisions and actions were in conflict with the arrangements under which they lived their lives. Their experiences revealed some consequences that emerge from such conflict and the human costs often engendered as a result. Those consequences told us why race, gender, and violence matter. They matter simply because they provide the very foundation of human relationships . Race, gender, and violence encode a set of social norms and cultural values that structure everyday lives in ways that simultaneously validate and diminish opportunities for human flourishing. Those influences of the human condition, as the men’s interpretations and experiences suggested, were not absolute determinants of their life chances. Neither were the men simple victims of oppression, nor did they exercise complete control over their lives. Rather, I show how they could transform their lives even within and against rigid structures of inequality and injustice. Those transformations were notable to the shaping of their self-images, interactions with others, and what they came to value. Even as their decisions and actions led to seemingly predictable outcomes , it was important that predictability did not strip away their sense of humanity, where they could easily have become a social category that rendered them just another black male type with a simplified reality. As the complexities of their lives revealed themselves through childhood experiences and later during adulthood, I have marveled at their strengths while regretting their fallibilities. Regardless of the emotions their experiences evoked, the full embodiment of the men’s humanity was on display: the good, bad, and ugliness of who they presented as both individuals and as a group. Events in their narratives may have challenged or threatened our ability to fully acknowledge the men’s human worth. If so, we must ask ourselves, what about their lives led them to the thoughts and actions they took? In other words, why did they make certain decisions and act in certain ways in the context of the choices, options, and opportunities available or unavailable to them in given situations? Of course, reasons abound to justify their thoughts and actions. But ever present, whether on the surface or just beneath, a partial answer for understanding their decisions and actions rested on how each theorized the...

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