Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality PDF

Author: Bonnie A. Lucero

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0826360106

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One of the most paradoxical aspects of Cuban history is the coexistence of national myths of racial harmony with lived experiences of racial inequality. Here a historian addresses this issue by examining the ways soldiers and politicians coded their discussions of race in ideas of masculinity during Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuban insurgents, the author shows, rarely mentioned race outright. Instead, they often expressed their attitudes toward racial hierarchy through distinctly gendered language—revolutionary masculinity. By examining the relationship between historical experiences of race and discourses of masculinity, Lucero advances understandings about how racial exclusion functioned in a supposedly raceless society. Revolutionary masculinity, she shows, outwardly reinforced the centrality of color blindness to Cuban ideals of manhood at the same time as it perpetuated exclusion of Cubans of African descent from positions of authority.

A Cuban City, Segregated

A Cuban City, Segregated PDF

Author: Bonnie A. Lucero

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0817320032

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A microhistory of racial segregation in Cienfuegos, a central Cuban port city Founded as a white colony in 1819, Cienfuegos, Cuba, quickly became home to people of African descent, both free and enslaved, and later a small community of Chinese and other immigrants. Despite the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that defined the city's population, the urban landscape was characterized by distinctive racial boundaries, separating the white city center from the heterogeneous peripheries. A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century explores how the de facto racial segregation was constructed and perpetuated in a society devoid of explicitly racial laws. Drawing on the insights of intersectional feminism, Bonnie A. Lucero shows that the key to understanding racial segregation in Cuba is recognizing the often unspoken ways specifically classed notions and practices of gender shaped the historical production of race and racial inequality. In the context of nineteenth-century Cienfuegos, gender, race, and class converged in the concept of urban order, a complex and historically contingent nexus of ideas about the appropriate and desired social hierarchy among urban residents, often embodied spatially in particular relationships to the urban landscape. As Cienfuegos evolved subtly over time, the internal logic of urban order was driven by the construction and defense of a legible, developed, aesthetically pleasing, and, most importantly, white city center. Local authorities produced policies that reduced access to the city center along class and gendered lines, for example, by imposing expensive building codes on centric lands, criminalizing poor peoples' leisure activities, regulating prostitution, and quashing organized labor. Although none of these policies mentioned race outright, this new scholarship demonstrates that the policies were instrumental in producing and perpetuating the geographic marginality and discursive erasure of people of color from the historic center of Cienfuegos during its first century of existence.

The Agony of Masculinity

The Agony of Masculinity PDF

Author: Pierre W. Orelus

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781433104176

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Drawing on critical race theory and empirical data from case studies involving fifty men of African descent, this book presents a new perspective on black masculinity, maleness, sexism, and institutional racism. The book situates black masculinity in a racial, socio-historical, and postcolonial context to provide innovative ways of understanding the profound effects of institutional racism. Although its focus is primarily on people of African descent, the book addresses issues concerning all races and ethnicities, explores the harmful effects of sexism and homophobia on women and queer people, and proposes practical steps that can be taken to fight against socio-economic inequality and injustice that is racially-, gender-, and sexually-based. Given the practical nature and interdisciplinary dimension of this book, readers and educators studying race, racism, sexism, and gender issues will find it germane to their needs and their classes.

New Men

New Men PDF

Author: Thomas A. Foster

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011-01-24

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0814728227

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In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote, “What then, is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” In casting aside their European mores, these pioneers, de Crèvecoeur implied, were the very embodiment of a new culture, society, economy, and political system. But to what extent did manliness shape early America’s character and institutions? And what roles did race, ethnicity, and class play in forming masculinity? Thomas A. Foster and his contributors grapple with these questions in New Men, showcasing how colonial and Revolutionary conditions gave rise to new standards of British American manliness. Focusing on Indian, African, and European masculinities in British America from earliest Jamestown through the Revolutionary era, and addressing such topics that range from slavery to philanthropy, and from satire to warfare, the essays in this anthology collectively demonstrate how the economic, political, social, cultural, and religious conditions of early America shaped and were shaped by ideals of masculinity. Contributors: Susan Abram, Tyler Boulware, Kathleen Brown, Trevor Burnard, Toby L. Ditz, Carolyn Eastman, Benjamin Irvin, Janet Moore Lindman, John Gilbert McCurdy, Mary Beth Norton, Ann Marie Plane, Jessica Choppin Roney, and Natalie A. Zacek.

I Am a Man!

I Am a Man! PDF

Author: Steve Estes

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-03-08

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 080787633X

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The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. He then explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society.

Prizefighting and Civilization

Prizefighting and Civilization PDF

Author: David C. LaFevor

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0826361595

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In Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940, historian David C. LaFevor traces the history of pugilism in Mexico and Cuba from its controversial beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through its exponential rise in popularity during the early twentieth century. A divisive subculture that was both a profitable blood sport and a contentious public spectacle, boxing provides a unique vantage point from which LaFevor examines the deeper historical evolution of national identity, everyday normative concepts of masculinity and race, and an expanding and democratizing public sphere in both Mexico and Cuba, the United States’ closest Latin American neighbors. Prizefighting and Civilization explores the processes by which boxing—once considered an outlandish purveyor of low culture—evolved into a nationalized pillar of popular culture, a point of pride that transcends gender, race, and class.

Gender, Race, and the Politics of Role Modelling

Gender, Race, and the Politics of Role Modelling PDF

Author: Wayne Martino

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1136492852

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This book provides an illuminating account of teachers’ own reflections on their experiences of teaching in urban schools. It was conceived as a direct response to policy-related and media-generated concerns about male teacher shortage and offers a critique of the call for more male role models in elementary schools to address important issues regarding gender, race and the politics of representation. By including the perspectives of minority teachers and students, and by drawing on feminist, queer and anti-racist frameworks, this book rejects the familiar tendency to resort to role modelling as a basis for explaining or addressing boys’ disaffection with schooling. Indeed, the authors argue, on the basis of their research in urban schools in Canada and Australia, that educational policy concerned with male teacher shortage and the plight of disadvantaged minority boys would benefit from engaging with analytic perspectives and empirical literature that takes readers beyond hegemonic discourses of role modelling. A compelling case is presented for the need to disarticulate discourses about role modelling from a politics of representation that is committed to addressing the reality of the impact of racial and structural inequalities on both minority teachers and students’ participation in the education system. The book also provides insight into the persistence of gender inequality as it relates to the status of elementary school teaching as women’s work.

Uncontrollable Blackness

Uncontrollable Blackness PDF

Author: Douglas J. Flowe

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1469655748

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Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance. Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

Women, Race, & Class

Women, Race, & Class PDF

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-06-29

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0307798496

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From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

Afro-Cuban Voices

Afro-Cuban Voices PDF

Author: Pedro Pérez Sarduy

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0813065550

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From the forewords: "At a time when Cuba is undergoing immense economic and social changes, race becomes a kind of cultural litmus test for the national identity. . . . This anthology illustrates fully that it is possible to be both revolutionary and black in Cuba."—Manning Marable, Columbia University "The authors of Afro-Cuban Voices, also key actors in the new, unfolding dialogue about race in Cuba, make a seminal contribution through a forthright critique of ‘racial blind spots’ in official history and present-day racial discrimination."—James Early, director of cultural studies and communication, Smithsonian Institution From the series editor: "A courageous attempt to deal head-on with the issue of race in Cuba today. . . . Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs [seek to] put a human face on this debate, and do so well. The book will be received with relief by some and with frustration by others. Controversial it will undoubtedly be, since—as with most things Cuban—strong emotions are a given assumption. It will be an admirable beginning for the series and, it is hoped, will spark a much-needed debate in the United States on many aspects of the ‘Cuban question.’ It is about time."—John M. Kirk Based on the vivid firsthand testimony of prominent Afro-Cubans who live in Cuba, this book of interviews looks at ways that race affects daily life on the island. While celebrating their racial and national identity, the collected voices express an urgent need to end the silences and distortions of history in both pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba. The 14 people interviewed—of different generations and from different geographic areas of Cuba—come from the arts, the media, industry, academia, and medicine. They include a doctor who calls for joint U.S.-Cuban studies on high blood pressure and a craftsman who makes the batá drums used in Yoruba worship ceremonies. All responded to four controversial questions: What is it like to be black in Cuba? How has the revolution made a difference? To what extent is that difference true today? What can be done? Exposing the contradictions of both racial stereotyping and cultural assimilation, their eloquent answers make the case that the issue of race in Cuba, no matter how hard to define, will not be ignored. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk