Kirjahaku

This cultural history of nineteenth-century narratives of slave and free women traces the ways in which these writings began to resist dominant literary conventions and to offer the first alternative versions of black womanhood. Covering the period between the 1850s and the turn of the century, it depicts an era of intense cultural and political activity when Afro-American women first began to emerge as novelists. Why black women wrote novels, and what they thought novels could do, are among the questions discussed.

With the 1987 publication of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black American Woman Novelist Hazel Carby produced a groundbreaking cultural history of nineteenth-century African American women, and an unapologetic black feminist intervention. The work proved that literature was itself a key site for the development of cultural and political ideas that would come to dominate later thinking. The women whose lives and work are here documented, celebrated, and commemorated refused to be intimidated or silenced by a nation that sought to exploit their labor and reproductive power, and to deny their humanity. Reconstructing Womanhood proved an excoriating critique of the era's focus on “great men” in African American literary and cultural criticism that obscured the work of their female contemporaries. It revised the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of fervent cultural and political activity by such figures as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. With updated text and a new preface by the author, an introduction by Sarah Haley, and afterword by Robert Reid Pharr, the book remains as impactful today as it was in 1987, ready for a new generation of scholars and thinkers.

With the 1987 publication of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black American Woman Novelist Hazel Carby produced a groundbreaking cultural history of nineteenth-century African American women, and an unapologetic black feminist intervention. The work proved that literature was itself a key site for the development of cultural and political ideas that would come to dominate later thinking. The women whose lives and work are here documented, celebrated, and commemorated refused to be intimidated or silenced by a nation that sought to exploit their labor and reproductive power, and to deny their humanity. Reconstructing Womanhood proved an excoriating critique of the era's focus on “great men” in African American literary and cultural criticism that obscured the work of their female contemporaries. It revised the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of fervent cultural and political activity by such figures as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. With updated text and a new preface by the author, an introduction by Sarah Haley, and afterword by Robert Reid Pharr, the book remains as impactful today as it was in 1987, ready for a new generation of scholars and thinkers.

Who are the “race men” standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society—and how they exclude women altogether.Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement—a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity.In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men—still leaving women out of the picture.A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.