Constructing The Black Masculine

Explores how African-American males have been portrayed in literature and society from 1775 to 1995.

Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora analyzes Black male identity as constructed by Black male authors. In each chapter, Dr. Jefferson-James discusses a different "construction" or definition of masculine identity produced by men of African descent on the continent of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in North America. Combing through the works of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, George Lamming, and other pan-African authors, Masculinity Under Construction argues for the importance of analyzing the historical context that contributed to the formation of Black male identity. Additionally, Dr. Jefferson-James draws a relationship between Black feminists and writers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and her contemporaries, and these works of literature viewed as primarily about Black masculinity.

Black males are disproportionately "in trouble" and suspended from the nation’s school systems. This is as true now as it was when Ann Arnett Ferguson’s now classic Bad Boys was first published. Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students in order to demonstrate how a group of eleven- and twelve-year-old males construct a sense of self under adverse circumstances. This new edition includes a foreword by Pedro A. Noguera, and an afterword and bibliographic essay by the author, all of which reflect on the continuing relevance of this work nearly two decades after its initial publication.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", language: English, abstract: In this term paper the construction of black masculinity and black male characters in Blaxploitation movies and Hood Movies will be compared to analyze if the two periods of filmmaking have created another view on the black masculine. To make the two genres comparable in such a limited scope I will focus on two movies, each of which can be regarded as prototypical for its genre. Considering the ‘Blaxploitation’ genre I will focus on the movie Shaft (1971) by Gordon Parks. The Hood movie I chose is John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991), which will be called Boyz in the rest of this term paper. Anybody who has seen movies featuring black male protagonists in major roles – like Bad Boys or Django Unchained – might have noticed that often those black male characters are depicted in certain and often clichéd ways. This depiction can be described by another term which is ‘construction’. What those films actually do is a construction of a black masculinity through means of acting, filming techniques or even the choice of the actor, especially with regard to his outward appearance. The black male character has been a very central figure in American literature and movies for a long time. Considering movies it can be argued that for roughly one century there have been constructions of African-American males in American cinema starting with the highly racist film The Birth of a Nation. Nowadays virtually everybody will know movies that feature black masculine main protagonists. Two periods which can be considered as highly influential with regard to the construction of black masculinity are the early seventies and the early nineties because they originated two important genres. These two genres will be referred to as ‘Blaxploitation’ and ‘hood movie’ throughout this text.

This fascinating book traces the development of the author's consciousness as a black male pro-feminist professor. Gary L. Lemons explores the meaning of black male feminism by examining his experiences at the New York City college where he taught for more than a decade—a small, private, liberal arts college where the majority of the students were white and female. Through a series of classroom case studies, he presents the transformative power of memoir writing as a strategic tool for enabling students to understand the critical relationship between the personal and the political. From the insightful inclusion of his own personal narratives about his childhood experience of domestic violence, to stories about being a student and teacher in majority white classrooms for most of his life, Lemons takes the reader on a provocative journey about what it means to be black, male, and pro-feminist.

Traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in hip-hop music and film.