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

From the Publisher

This parthbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. 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.

About the Author:
Riche Richardson is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis

D.E. Magill - Choice

In this remarkable book, Richardson offers compelling readings situated against the backdrop of race and gender relations in the South ... Her contribution to these particular literatures and to American studies more generally cannot be overstated, since she offers a complex rethinking of the relationships between race and region, gender and geography, culture and text.

Journal of American Ethnic History

Riche Richardson has given us an enormously complex analysis of the historical and contemporary cultural representations of southern black men.... Black Masculinity and the U.S. South makes a very important contribution to, among other fields, African American and gender studies.... [T]his is a book with which scholars writing about African American masculinity will have to reckon.--(Martin Summers, University of Texas at Austin)

Product Details

• ISBN: 0820328901
  
• ISBN-13: 9780820328904
• Format: Paperback, 312pp
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Pub. Date: February 2007
• Sales Rank: 180,780
• Series: New Southern Studies Ser.

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents