PULLING DOWN THE HOUSE AND TEARING UP THE YARD: CONSTRUCTING, POLICING, AND CONTAINING BLACK MASCULINITY, 1920-1960

Abstract

"Pulling Down the House and Tearing Up the Yard: Constructing, Policing and Containing Black Masculinity, 1920-1960" explores the role of the black press, black lifestyle magazines, and selected journalists and publishers in the discursive construction of black middle-class masculinity during the 1920s to the 1960s in order to advance the cause of racial equality. Journalists and publishers, acting as civil rights agents, re-imagined and reconstructed ideal representations and representatives of black manhood and disseminated these images in their respective publications so that ordinary black citizens, or the "submerged tenth," would emulate behaviors deemed appropriate and respectable. As a result, those individuals whose behaviors were unrespectable, and thus deemed detrimental to the cause of racial uplift, were marginalized and policed. At the core of this work is the question, "How did cultural producers continue to re-imagine the New Negro?" This project does not assume that a static form of black masculinity was generally received as emblematic of the race; rather, it posits that African American cultural producers and the black community, in general, held malleable assumptions about respectability and masculinity during any given era. Thus, explicit in this examination is that masculinity, or rather masculinities, were unstable qualities of maleness, subject to historical and cultural contexts as well as media manipulation and political maneuvering.