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

The black middle class is making a comeback in African American social history.¹ Martin Summers' new book adds to this re-centering of the African American bourgeoisie, while also critically engaging the field of gender studies—particularly the "new" men's history. Situating himself in the discursive space between Kevin K. Gaines' Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, and Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Summers argues that African American and African Caribbean middle-class men at the turn of the twentieth century subscribed to dominant Anglo-American ideas equating manhood with political citizenship, "character," productive engagement in the marketplace, patriarchy, self-restraint, and imperial designs. He contends, moreover, that as a "shift from Victorian asceticism to postwar consumerism" generated new definitions of manhood rooted in leisure, physical exuberance, emotive self-expression and sexual virility, black middle-class notions of manliness, too, underwent a corresponding sea change. (269)

Yet, the author maintains that in "constructing and staging" their class-bound gendered selves, black middle-class men did not simply emulate white cultural standards. Summers rejects depictions of a hegemonic (white middle-class) manhood in which subordinated masculinities function as mute objects of white, heterosexual, elite male anxieties, or as sites of uncomplicated resistance. While recognizing the far-reaching power of a hegemonic masculinity, Summers instead limns the process of black male middle-class and gender-identity formation as it occurred through modalities beyond direct white control. In the first half of the book, titled "Manliness," he considers the role of the Prince Hall Freemasons, and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), as agents in the production of black middle-class male identity. Although politically dissimilar, intellectual leaders and publicists for both organizations promoted the same Victorian "producer values," and regarded black men as the natural providers for, and protectors of, the race. Like other representatives of an emergent new black middle strata, Freemasons and Garveyites also wielded an elite ideology of "racial uplift" wherein black progress was synonymous with class and age hierarchies in black institutions, and patriarchy was posited as the norm in black families and communities. While black women were subordinates in these practices, Summers demonstrates that they nonetheless participated in these discourses, either by actively endorsing their own domesticity, or by publicly opposing black patriarchal authority.

If Garvey nationalists and black Freemasons embodied a standard Victorian model of black middle-class manliness, another cohort of the black bourgeois elite symbolized a nascent masculinity, one influenced by migration, urbanization, war, and the libertinism of the "Jazz Age." The book's second half, "Discontents," focuses on this younger generation of middle-class black males, who eschewed the prevailing social codes of respectability, thrift, and sober plainness. Embracing mass culture and consumption, many engaged in a series of student revolts against restrictive administrative policies at Fisk, Howard, and several other black colleges and universities. Steeped in a modernist ethos of self-gratification, a number of emissaries from this generation—notably Harlem Renaissance luminaries like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes—adopted a masculinity that openly countenanced hetero- and homosexual relations. Summers reveals that in crafting a counter-hegemonic racial manhood, young black bourgeois rebels paradoxically (1) sought inspiration in the folkways of the black working class; and (2) celebrated values that, by Victorian standards at least, reinforced assumptions of black people as a "feminine" race. He concludes that the transformation of black middle-class masculinity may have liberated middle-class African Americans/Caribbeans from antiquated nineteenth-century modes of thought, but it also laid a basis for the scandalous excesses famously excoriated in E. Franklin Frazier's 1957 study, Black Bourgeoisie.

This book is closely researched, carefully organized, and skillfully argued. Summers thoughtfully balances social, intellectual, and cultural history...