Reimagining Black Masculinities

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.

* Choi