Searching for the New Black Man

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois James Baldwin Walter Mosley and Barack Obama Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities the author shows how black men's struggles for gendered agency are inextricably entwined with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which this study couches these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological cultural and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize identity.Yet Henry Anthony quickly moves to texts that challenge traditional constructions of black masculinity. In these texts she traces how the emergence of collaboratively gendered discourses or a blending of black female/male feminist consciousnesses are reshaping black masculinities femininities and intraracial relations for a new century.