Synopses & Reviews
Manning the Race explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Marlon Ross provides an intellectual history of both famous and lesser-known men who have servedcontroversiallyas models and foils for black masculine competence.
Ross examines a host of early twentieth-century cultural sites where black masculinity struggles against Jim Crow: the mobilization of the New Negro; the sexual politics of autobiography in the post-emancipation generation; the emergence of black male sociology; sexual rivalry and networking in biracial uplift institutions; Negro Renaissance arts patronage; and the sexual construction of the black urban folk novel. Focusing on the overlooked dynamics of symbolic fraternity, intimate friendship, and erotic bonding within and across gender, Manning the Race is the first book to integrate same-sexuality into the cultural history of black manhood. By approaching black manhood as a culturally contested arena, this important new work reveals the changing meanings and enactments of race, gender, nation, and sexuality in modern America.
Manning the Race opens new approaches to the study of black manhood in relation to U.S. culture. Where previous books tended to emphasize how individual black men's identities have been reactively informed by the U.S. regime of race and sexuality, Manning the Race makes the case for understanding how black men themselves have been primary agents and subjects in formulating the identity and practices of black manhood.
Review
"This major effort describes and analyzes how African American men were socialized and imaged for their public and private roles in the early 20th Century. Ross takes readers deeper into new dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance and African American urban life."-CHOICE,
Review
"In this rich, eloquent, and indeed magisterial study, Marlon B. Ross explores how black manhood was constructed, produced, and reproduced under Jim Crow. At once cultural criticism and intellectual history, Manning the Race is a landmark contribution to the study of the deeply imbricated discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and nation."-Valerie Smith,Princeton University
Review
"An ambitious intellectual history of black manhood reform in the New Negro Movement, dating roughly from the 1890s to the 1940s."-GC Advocate,
Synopsis
Before World War II an intimate connection between the ideas of Europe and romantic love was widely accepted and virtually unchallenged. Only after Europe was ravaged by war and fractured by superpower conflict was this connection called into question. Today, with the success of the European Union, such themes are reemerging in art, literature, music, and everyday conversation.
In Europe in Love, Love in Europe we revisit Europe between world wars to explore the lost connections between love, culture, and ideology. Passerini investigates different ways in which historians, politicians, psychoanalysts, and psychologists analyzed the crisis of European civilization, providing a history of ideas and emotions. Her focus on specific texts ranges from best-selling novels to artworks set in the context of debates on marriage, sex, and friendship. Europe in Love, Love in Europe concludes with the story of a correspondence between spouses, an English woman and a German man during World War II, a powerful example of what it could mean to live the European dimension of a love relationship in that historical moment.
Passerini offers a compelling original perspective on the modern anxiety over national identity and European unity-and a powerful rejoinder to political and cultural Eurocentrism.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 328-344) and index.
About the Author
Luisa Passerini is Professor of Twentieth-Century History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her books include Fascism in Popular Memory, Memory and Totalitarianism, and Autobiography of a Generation.