Synopses & Reviews
This book aims to provide different, varied, and sometimes even conflicting perspectives on masculinity and whiteness. Like black masculinity itself, which has been shown to vary throughout different cultural and historical locations, white masculinity is also analyzed here as a shifting and often even contradictory construction. Indeed, rather than white masculinity, this study is concerned with exploring white masculinities in the plural, showing their intricate, porous, and often ambiguous representations in the fiction of five American authors, black and white, male and female, gay and straight. The analysis of white masculinities from such multiple racial, gendered, and sexual angles seeks to provide a more complex and multifaceted view on the subject.
Synopsis
Inverting the traditional focus of ethnic studies on blackness as the object of scrutiny, Masculinities in Black and White explores dominant forms of white masculinity as seen by African American authors placed alongside certain white writers. Josep M. Armengol explores white masculinities in the plural, showing their intricate, porous, and often ambiguous representations in the fiction of five American authors, black and white, male and female, gay and straight. The analysis of white masculinities from such multiple racial, gendered, and sexual angles seeks to provide a more complex and multifaceted view on the subject.
About the Author
Josep M. Armengol is Associate Professor of English at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He is the author of Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (2010) as well as the editor of Debating Masculinity (2009) and Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (2014). He is one of the editors of the journal Men and Masculinities. His work on literary representations of masculinities has been published in prestigious academic journals such as Signs, The Hemingway Review, and the Journal of Gender Studies, among others.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Slavery in Black and White: White Masculinity as Enslaving in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass2. Of Gray Vapors and Creeping Clouds: White (Male) Privilege as Blinding in Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno'.3. Revisiting Masculinity and/as Whiteness in Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro4. Dark Objects of Desire: The Blackness of (Homo)sexuality in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room5. Race and Gender in the Mirror: A (White) Woman's Look at (Black) Racism in Martha Gellhorn's "White Into Black"