Traces the history of black men in America using a tough-guy image to obscure their anger and disappointment over their roles in society back to their origins in Africa and the slave era.

This book provides wide-ranging commentary on depictions of the black male in mainstream cinema. O’Brien explores the extent to which counter-representations of black masculinity have been achieved within a predominately white industry, with an emphasis on agency, the negotiation and malleability of racial status, and the inherent instability of imposed racial categories. Focusing on American and European cinema, the chapters highlight actors (Woody Strode, Noble Johnson, Eddie Anderson, Will Smith), genres (jungle pictures, westerns, science fiction) and franchises (Tarzan, James Bond) underrepresented in previous critical and scholarly commentary in the field. The author argues that although the characters and performances generated in these areas invoke popular genre types, they display complexity, diversity and ambiguity, exhibiting aspects that are positive, progressive and subversive. This book will appeal to both the academic and the general reader interested in film, race, gender and colonial issues.

This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama’s 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions—from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day to John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight—to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture.

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gangsta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender.

Traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in hip-hop music and film.

Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re-Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora analyzes Black male identity as constructed by Black male authors. In each chapter, Dr. Jefferson-James discusses a different "construction" or definition of masculine identity produced by men of African descent on the continent of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in North America. Combing through the works of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison, George Lamming, and other pan-African authors, Masculinity Under Construction argues for the importance of analyzing the historical context that contributed to the formation of Black male identity. Additionally, Dr. Jefferson-James draws a relationship between Black feminists and writers, such as Anna Julia Cooper and her contemporaries, and these works of literature viewed as primarily about Black masculinity.

This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity.