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Reviews
| Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. By Riché Richardson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. xi + 296 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
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Riché Richardson has given us an enormously complex analysis of the historical and contemporary cultural representations of southern black men. While there is no shortage of scholarly texts on black masculinity in which the South figures at least in superficial ways, Richardson's study is one of the first that centers the region in a spatial analysis of the ideological construction and cultural performance of black male subjectivity. For this reason, Black Masculinity in the U.S. South makes a very important contribution to, among other fields, African American and gender studies. |
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Richardson's essential argument is that black masculinity has been burdened by the representation of the "black southern male's body as pathological and abject" (p. 2). These representations have their origins in the nineteenth century, with the production and circulation of the iconic figures of Uncle Tom and the black rapist in the Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras, respectively. This framing of southern black masculinity as pathological not only shaped, and continues to shape, race relations in the United States; it has also contributed to the production of intraracial gender hierarchies. African American men themselves, Richardson argues, have invoked an "abject" southern black masculinity against which to construct an "authentic" and "normative" manhood that is, by definition, northern and urban. While the author identifies this dynamic in literature produced from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s—including the novels of Sutton Griggs, Nella Larsen, and Ralph Ellison—it is the political discourse and popular culture of the black power and post–civil rights era that she finds most salient. |
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Some of Richardson's sharpest analysis emerges through her examination of Malcolm X's feminization of southern civil rights leaders through his (in)famous "house Negro–field Negro" formulation of the genealogy of black politics; of the marginalization of southern black men within racial uplift ideologies, as reflected in Charles Fuller's drama, A Soldier's Play (1982); and of the juxtaposition of a northern, revolutionary black masculinity and a conservative and pathological southern black masculinity in Spike Lee's films School Daze (1988) and Get on the Bus (1996). Richardson concludes the study with a cogent discussion of the ways "dirty South" rappers attempt to contest this spatial privileging of black masculinity. |
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This is an overly simplistic summary that does not do justice to the study's nuances. In identifying geographic difference as one of the ways in which African American men are "a historically differentiated and variegated raced, gendered, and sexed social category" (p. 7), Richardson has added one more analytical layer to the study of black masculinity. The interdisciplinary ambition of the work is admirable, with the author drawing on black literary criticism and film studies; gender and queer studies; and cultural geography, southern studies, and rural studies. |
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Richardson's vision of the existing scholarship on black masculinity, however, is somewhat limited. Some of the questions that she addresses are not as neglected in the field of African American studies as she suggests. It would have been interesting to see how, if at all, her arguments would have changed had she consulted some of the most recent scholarship, including Roderick Ferguson's work on Ellison's critique of sociology and the pathologization of black culture or Steve Estes's work on the masculinist politics of black nationalism and black power. That she does not address this scholarship may be the result of a lengthy publication process. However, Richardson cannot be excused for providing a grossly inaccurate discussion of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. She has Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey leading a revolt in South Carolina that ended in the deaths of fifty-seven whites and Nat Turner the head of a conspiracy that was revealed before it could be executed. Careful reading on her part would have allowed her to catch her mistakes and correctly identify Prosser and Vesey as respective leaders of two unrealized rebellions in Virginia and South Carolina and Turner as the leader of a revolt in Virginia that resulted in the murder of whites. Notwithstanding these weaknesses, this is a book with which scholars writing about African American masculinity will have to reckon.
Martin Summers
University of Texas at Austin
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