Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta

New Southern Studies

by Riché Richardson

This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men—often contradictory ones—have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright preacher. To complicate matters, says Riché Richardson, blacks themselves appropriate these images for purposes never intended by their (mostly) white progenitors.

Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity that derive ideological force from their associations with the South. Military policy, black-liberation discourse, and contemporary rap, she argues, are just some of the instruments by which egregious pathologies of black masculinity in southern history have been sustained. Richardson's sources are eclectic and provocative, including Ralph Ellison's fiction, Charles Fuller's plays, Spike Lee's films, Huey Newton's and Malcolm X's political rhetoric, the O. J. Simpson discourse, and the music production of Master P, the Cash Money Millionaires, and other Dirty South rappers.

Filled with new insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts, this new study points the way toward more epistemological frameworks for southern literature, southern studies, and gender studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Gender

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2007

About the author

Riché Richardson is an associate professor of African American literature in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.

Reviews

[H. Givens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely love her intertextual-analysis approach. Using fiction and culture to analyze perceptions and stereotypes is what I'm all about. She chose significant works with undeniable real-world meaning, both from impact and from authorial intent, so there's basically no way you can say these things don't matter, and she also brings it back to real-world examples to show how the symbols hold up in the national mindset. I originally had some mild concerns about her being female, but she's definitely "inside" enough to tell me an awful lot I didn't know, and she was more able to include the effects of masculine ideals on women than anyone in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction which I read in tandem.

I just wish the writing was a little more put-together. It's not clear -- it's a little jargon-heavy, with huge paragraphs, and I had trouble following one idea to another because she jumped around so much giving examples. She also under-describes the fiction in some cases, but I do realize that "assuming readers have read the book" is standard practice in literary criticism. Finally, not so much a criticism of the book, but she talks about things like psychological abjection a lot -- very interesting, but given the topic and approach, I’d also like to see more on how stereotypes or just types/tropes are internalized and used on an individual level. It's not really "missing" from her work, but it could add a lot of value.

[Mark Cheathem]

The chapters on Malcolm X and the Dirty South rap are good. The rest of the book needed tighter editing and less jargon. What can one expect from a lit critter? :P