Winner of the 2007 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association Scripting the Black Masculine Body traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in popular cultural productions. From early blackface cinema through contemporary portrayals of the Black body in hip-hop music and film, Ronald L. Jackson II examines how African American identities have been socially constructed, constituted, and publicly understood, and argues that popular music artists and film producers often are complicit with Black body stereotypes. Jackson offers a communicative perspective on body politics through a blend of social scientific and humanities approaches and offers possibilities for the liberation of the Black body from its current ineffectual and paralyzing representations.

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

Winner of the 2014 Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work. Bringing together contributors from a wide-range of critical perspectives, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation is an analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics. Covering comic books, superhero comics, graphic novels and cartoon strips from the early 20th century to the present, the book explores the ways in which Black comic artists have grappled with such themes as the Black experience, gender identity, politics and social media. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation introduces students to such key texts as: The work of Jackie Ormes Black women superheroes from Vixen to Black Panther Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks

This book proposes a pedagogy of black urban struggle and solidarity.

How do Black men imagine who they are and what they must do ...within their families, communities, and the world? The essays in this collection both ask and attempt to answer this question. Based in communication, and drawing from diverse disciplines, Masculinity in the Black Imagination seeks to address identity, race, and gender by examining the communicative dimensions of Black manhood. The collection works to define, deconstruct, and contextualize the interactive practice of masculinity as both a local and global phenomenon.

Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance is unique in bringing together these three important topics in the context of communication teaching and scholarship with an eye toward interdisciplinary perspectives. In fourteen chapters, the leading whiteness scholars in the field of communication analyze the process of teaching and learning and the complicated intersections of whiteness, racial identity, and cross-racial dialogue.

Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary voices, Global Masculinities and Manhood examines the concept of masculinity from the perspectives of cultures around the world. In the era of globalization, masculinity continues to be studied in a Western-centric context. Contributors to this volume, however, deconstruct the history and politics of masculinities within the contexts of the cultures from which they have been developed, examining what makes a man who he is within his own culture. Highlighting manifestations of masculinity in countries including Jamaica, Turkey, Peru, Kenya, Australia, and China, scholars from a variety of disciplines grapple with the complex politics of identity and the question of how gender is interpreted and practiced through discourse. Topics include how masculinity is affected by war and conflict, defined in relation to race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and expressed in cultural activities such as sports or the cinema. Contributors are Bryant Keith Alexander, Molefi K. Asante, Murali Balaji, Maurice Hall, Ronald L. Jackson II, Shino Konishi, Nil Mutluer, Mich Nyawalo, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Margarita Saona, and Kath Woodward.

Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space addresses how Black masculinities are created, negotiated, and contested in public spaces, focusing on how theory meets praxis when mobilizing for social change. Contributors disentangle complexities of the Black experience and reimagine the radical progressive work required for societal health and wellbeing, forming a mental picture of what the world has the potential to be without excluding current realities for Black boys and men, civic manhood, maleness, and the fluidity of masculinities. These realities are acknowledged and interrogated across private and public contexts, media, education, occupation, and theoretical perspectives. This book encourages readers to reenvision social identity as an ongoing phenomenon, asserting that collective vision informs action and collective action informs possibilities for peace and freedom in the world around us. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and race studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Perhaps not since Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 classic An American Dilemma has a book appeared as synoptic and unsettling as The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America. Here William F. Pinar elucidates the great «American dilemma», that «peculiar» institution of racial subjugation, especially its gendered - and specifically «queer» - psychosexual dynamics. Explicating in detail two imprinting episodes in American racial history - lynching and prison rape - Pinar argues that the gender of racial politics and violence in America is in some fundamental sense «queer». This book will be of interest to students in education, cultural studies, African American studies, women's and gender studies, and history.

Living in a segregated society, white Americans learn about African Americans through the images the media show. This text offers a look at the racial patterns in the mass media and how they shape the ambivalent attitudes of whites toward blacks.