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,
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."
"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."
"An ambitious intellectual history of black manhood reform in the New Negro Movement, dating roughly from the 1890s to the 1940s."
Review
"David Shumway's (NYU Press, 2003) exercised an influence on the margins of academic film studies[.]"-Film Quarterly,
Review
“An extremely valuable contribution to the history of that supposedly timeless ideal, the intimate relationship.”
-Elizabeth Freeman,author of The Wedding Complex
Review
“A wide-ranging and beautifully dialectical analysis of the modern discourses on love and intimacy. David Shumway overturns some of the usual assumptions about romantic love and, in the process makes original, often surprising observations about literature, movies, pop music, self-help books, and a variety of other texts. Modern Love is a pleasure to read, and it contributes significantly to our understanding of modernity.”
-James Naremore,Indiana University
Review
“Fascinating and timely.”
-Intams Review,
Synopsis
Explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the first half of the 20th C.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
“My ideas of romance came from the movies,” said Woody Allen, and it is to the movies—as well as to novels, advice columns, and self-help books—that David Shumway turns for his history of modern love.
Modern Love argues that a crisis in the meaning and experience of marriage emerged when it lost its institutional function of controlling the distribution of property, and instead came to be seen as a locus for feelings of desire, togetherness, and loss. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly in response to this crisis, a new language of love—“intimacy”—emerged, not so much replacing but rather coexisting with the earlier language of “romance.”
Reading a wide range of texts, from early twentieth-century advice columns and their late twentieth-century antecedent, the relationship self-help book, to Hollywood screwball comedies, and from the “relationship films” of Woody Allen and his successors to contemporary realist novels about marriages, Shumway argues that the kinds of stories the culture has told itself have changed. Part laypersons history of marriage and romance, part meditation on intimacy itself, Modern Love will be both amusing and interesting to almost anyone who thinks about relationships (and who doesnt?).
About the Author
Marlon Ross is professor of English in the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry.