Performing Black Masculinity

Race, Culture, and Queer Identity

By (author) Bryant Keith Alexander

Publication date:

24 July 2006

Length of book:

282 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759109285

This is a remarkable set of linked essays on the African American male experience. Alexander picks a number of settings that highlight Black male interaction, sexuality, and identity_the student-teacher interaction, the black barbershop, drag queen performances, the funeral eulogy. From these he builds a theory of Black masculine identity using auto-ethnography and ideas of performance as his base.

1 Introduction: Exploring Modalities and Subjectiveness that Shape Social Relations
2 Crossing Borders and Changing Customs: Moments When the Spectator Becomes the Spectacle
3 Placement and Displacement of Black Identity: The Case of Migration across Borders from Campus to Community
4 Passing, Cultural Performance and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity
5 (Re) Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography, Performing Drag, and Feminist Pedagogy
6 Fading, Twisting, and Weaving: An Interpretive Ethnography of the Black Barbershop/Salon as Cultural Space
7 "Were/Are, Fort/Da": The Eulogy as Constitutive (Auto)biography (or, Traveling to Coalesce a Public Memory)

This is a vastly important book. In every chapter, the rich theoretical breadth of Alexanders's radically interdisciplinary thinking is meaningfully linked to a multi-sited ethnography and politics of human experience. Theory and practice are merged in Performing Black Masculinity to deepen and illuminate the "everyday" particularly the hidden complexities of race, sexuality and economies of belonging. This work is personal and political offering fresh, new insights to the relevance of autoethnography as a method of critical reflexivity that at its best is always already contesting both the small and the large machinations of injustice.