| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood. By Paul Gilmore. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. x, 274 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2754-6. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2764-3.)

When in the 1980s multiculturalist themes began to dominate literary studies, I thought that within a decade the fashion would pass. Not so. The thrill is gone, but the books keep coming. By the third sentence of The Genuine Article, we know that we can add it to the list. Sentence 1 mentions 'cultural representations of race,' sentence 2 connects them to 'questions of gender,' and sentence 3 invokes 'class formation.' The race/gender/class sequence follows in such predictable steps that one wonders whether the author, Paul Gilmore, was aware of just how routine it sounds. Subsequent paragraphs recite the customary beliefs: 'the instability of racial and gender identities,' 'the centrality of race to broader notions of middle-class manhood,' 'inherent contradictions of capitalism,' and the 'contingency of distinctions between high and low, male and female, white, black, and red.' . . .

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