Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000 Editors: Lydia Plath and Sergio Lussana Pages: 240 ISBN: 978-1443805964 Publication Date: 2009 Format: Hardcover Availability: In Stock List Price in USD: $67.99 Cambridge Scholars Publishing is offering readers of the LSS Newsletter a 20% discount off the list price. For information on ordering, click here. Simply use the offer code "LSSBLACK" at check-out to receive this special discount.

Building on the rich historiography of gender and culture undertaken in recent years, this volume highlights the important role Southern conceptions of masculinity have played in the lives of Southern men, and to reflect on how masculinity has intersected with class, race and power to structure the social relationships between blacks and whites throughout the history of the South. 

The volume highlights the multifaceted nature of Southern masculinities, demonstrating the changing ways black and white masculinities have been both imagined and practiced over the years, while also emphasizing that conceptions of black and white masculinity in the American South rarely seem to be divorced from wider questions of class, race and power.

About the Editors Lydia Plath is an Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. Her research focuses on identity and community formation in the antebellum South, with a particular focus on white masculinity, honour and violence during a slave insurrection scare that took place in Mississippi in the summer of 1835.  Sergio Lussana is a lecturer in American history at Nottingham Trent University. He received his BA in History from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and his MA and Ph.D at the University of Warwick. His present research examines notions of enslaved masculinity, friendship, and the existence of a male slave network in the antebellum Southern United States.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

• Introduction: Masculinity as a Category of Analysis in Southern History (Sergio Lussana and Lydia Plath)

Part I: White Perceptions of Masculinity: Honour, the Cavalier Image and the Citadel

• Chapter One: North Carolina and Nat Turner: Honour and Violence in a Slave
  Insurrection Scare (Lydia Plath)
• Chapter Two: “A Curious Compound of the Hero and the Dandy.” George Armstrong
  Custer, the Cavalier Image, and White Masculinity in the Postwar South (Adam Pratt)
• Chapter Three: Murder and Masculinity: The Trials of a Citadel Man (Alex Macaulay)
  

Part II: African American Perceptions of Masculinity: The Experiences of Slavery and its Legacy

• Chapter Four: Negotiating their Manhood: Masculinity amongst the Enslaved in the Upper South, 1830-1861 (Rebecca Fraser)
• Chapter Five: Who Gets to Wear the Cape: The Rise of the Black Superman in Martin
  Delany, Frederick Douglass and Beyond (Bob Batchelor and Josef Benson)

Part III: Racial Interaction and Masculinity: Segregation and the Myth of the Black Rapist

• Chapter Six: Masculinity and the Uniformed Southerner: The Arkansas National Guard and the Little Rock Crisis (Shawn Fisher)
• Chapter Seven: “The nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister”: Charles Bon and Joe
  Christmas as Black Rapists in William Faulkner’s Oeuvre (Biljana Oklopčić)

Part IV: The Representation of Southern Masculinities in Memoirs, Newspaper Advertisements and Literature

• Chapter Eight: Race and Heroism in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Civil War Memoir (Tara Deshpande)
• Chapter Nine: “You Might be a Redneck if . . .”: Advertising Southern Male Deviancy,
  1960-1992 (Colin Chapell)
• Chapter Ten: The Bonds We Share: Generational Surrogacy in Ernest J. Gaines’ “Three Men” (Anne Brown)

Contributors