Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space

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Description

Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space addresses how Black masculinities are created, negotiated, and contested in public spaces, focusing on how theory meets praxis when mobilizing for social change. Contributors disentangle complexities of the Black experience and reimagine the radical progressive work required for societal health and wellbeing, forming a mental picture of what the world has the potential to be without excluding current realities for Black boys and men, civic manhood, maleness, and the fluidity of masculinities. These realities are acknowledged and interrogated across private and public contexts, media, education, occupation, and theoretical perspectives. This book encourages readers to reenvision social identity as an ongoing phenomenon, asserting that collective vision informs action and collective action informs possibilities for peace and freedom in the world around us. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and race studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Reviews

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought much-needed attention to the social issues surrounding Black masculinity and highlighted the need for further scholarly study of this identity formation. Hopson (George Mason Univ.) and Petin (Motlow State Community College) have curated a compelling collection of essays that assess the current gender landscape and suggest ideas for potential future analysis. The text's particular focus on public spaces and activism allows its contributors to speculate on the ways in which American culture stigmatizes Black masculinities and to reconstruct new possibilities for Black manhood. Essays draw on diverse methodologies and canvass disparate social arenas to elucidate the breadth of influences that shape Black masculinities. They also cover a broad array of spaces such as education, labor, and intimate relationships, as well as textual creations from cinema, music, and print fictions. These areas are tied together by the rich imagining of new interventions for activists and thinkers around the performance of Black masculinities in the social world. This collection would be of interest to African American literary scholars as well as gender studies and Black feminist scholars. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Author Bio

Mark C. Hopson is director of African and African American studies and associate professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University.

Mikail Petin is assistant vice president of student success at Motlow State Community College.