Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Race Men. By Hazel V. Carby. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. x, 228 pp. $24.00, isbn 0-674-74558-2.)

This book is both wide-ranging and very particular. It takes as its subject "the cultural representation of various black masculinities at different historical moments and in different media: literature, photography, film, music and song." It also focuses on selected examples, "the cultural and political complexity of particular inscriptions, performances, and enactments of black masculinity on a variety of stages. Each stage is deliberately bounded and limited in its construction." The examples Hazel V. Carby chooses—W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903), Paul Robeson in the 1920s and 1930s, John and Alan Lomax's invention of Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) in their work on American folk music, C. L. R. James's writings on cricket, Miles Davis's music and Samuel Delany's writing in the 1950s and 1960s, and the film career of Danny Glover in the 1980s and 1990s—are designed to trace black masculinities from modern to postmodern times. Taking the concept of "race men" from St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945), Carby criticizes the masculinist assumptions in their ideas on race and nation. To explain the neglect of black women and gay male intellectuals, Carby studies the construction of black masculinity. . . .

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