Notes Introduction 1. John Blake, “Therapy and Theology: Atlanta’s Megafest Shows Many Sides of T.D. Jakes’ Ministry,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution June 23, 2004. 2. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33.2 (1981). Baym uses this term in describing the elision of women from the American canon and in literary criticism regarding the canon. I am using the term here to describe the response of men who feel that their masculinity is being attacked by these socio- political movements. 3. Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, Africana Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000). 4. See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) 88–89. 5. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) xi. 6. Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1997) xviii. 7. For Stephanie Brown “this unstinting relegation of black men to the ‘hinterland’ of masculinities studies makes the pioneering work of a bevy of scholars, includ- ing but by no means limited to Marcellus Blount, Hazel Carby, James Coleman, George Cunningham, Phillip Brian Harper, and Kobena Mercer, all the more vital.” See Stephanie Brown and Keith Clark, “Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood? Meditations on African-American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social Menace, an Introduction,” Callaloo 26.3 (2003): 735. 8. For example, see Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: Black Scholar Press, 1982) 2. 9. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917., Women in Culture and Society, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 7. 10. Marcellus Blount and George Philbert Cunningham, Representing Black Men (New York: Routledge, 1996) ix–xv. 11. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 22. 12. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992) 113. 148 Notes 13. Brown and Clark, “Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood?” 734. 14. See Angela Yvonne Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Angela Davis uses historical analysis, statistical data, literature, and sociology to link the three categories of her title. Davis’s work critiques of capitalism as an economic system that especially disadvantages women, while black men’s investment in the oppression of black women is related to their disadvantaged position as well. 15. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). 16. hooks, Black Looks, 89. 17. hooks, We Real Cool, xv. 18. hooks, Black Looks, 87. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. hooks, We Real Cool, xvii. 21. Kelly Brown Douglas and Ronald E. Hopson, “Understanding the Black Church: The Dynamics of Change,” Journal of Religious Thought 56/57.1 (2001): 96. 22. See Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver, W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, Paperback ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 215; Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, Sourcebooks in Negro History (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 40; and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke UP, 1990).For Frazier, the black church became the organized venue by which free blacks could begin to assimi- late and employ accomodationist tactics. It is no wonder, then, that the black church served as the pool from which the civil rights movement of the twentieth century could rely upon for leadership. According to Lincoln, “The black church is the uncontested mother of black culture.” With the dual missions of addressing “both the spiritual and social deficits of the human predicament,” the black church according to Lincoln became “the defining referent for the black community.” Andrew Billingsley provides a com- prehensive history and analysis of the Black church as an agent of social reform. See Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). 23. Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftal (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 326. 24. See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). 25. Dianne Stewart, “Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology,” The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theology in Dialogue, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin (New York: Continuum, 2001) 171. 26. See Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). 27. hooks, Black Looks, 2. 28. See Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church. 29. Harper, Are We Not Men?. 30. David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) 104. Notes 149 31. David L. Dudley, My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men’s Autobiography (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991). 32. John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994) 71. 33. For a discussion of the cultural processes of manhood, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. Chapter 1 1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Bantam, 1981) 431. Future references will be to this edition and will be marked by parenthetical cita- tions of the page numbers. 2. Charles Edward Stowe, ed., The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889) 148. 3. For a discussion on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of race as essential to human differences and how these perceptions informed social sci- entific conceptions of race, see Michael P. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). Stephen Gould offers a treatment of biological determin- ism in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expand ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). 4. For a discussion of romantic racialism, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Scranton, PA: Wesleyan UP, 1987). 5. Richard Yarborough describes them as “bumptious, giggling, outsized ado- lescents.” For a fuller discussion, see Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) 47. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 41. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and Terri Hume Oliver, eds., The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 155. 8. Ibid. 162–63. 9. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 41. 10. For a discussion of the ongoing tensions between biology and sociohistorical ele- ments in Du Bois’s work, see Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992). 11. Du Bois, Gates, and Oliver, eds., The Souls of Black Folk,10–11. 12. Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64.2 (1992): 301. 13. The concept of double consciousness continues to be an important concept as it relates to identity formation. See Gerald Lyn Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York: A. Lane/Penguin Press, 1993). This anthology explores and debates Du Bois’s claims from many different perspectives. 14. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, rev. ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993) 4. 150 Notes 15. Ibid., 5. 16. Ibid. 17. See Arthur Riss, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly 46.4 (1994). Riss traces Stowe’s use of racial essentialism to advance a progressive agenda. He argues that equating Stowe’s racialism with racism is shortsighted and reductive because such a claim does not take into con- sideration her advocacy of “liberal pluralism.” 18. Ibid. 19. Samuel Otter, “Stowe and Race,” The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein, Cambridge Companions to Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 19. 20. Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. and Beverly Guy-Sheftal Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 312. 21. Rudolph P. Byrd, “The Tradition of John: A Mode of Black Masculinity,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Scheftall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 19. 22. Kristin Waters, ed., Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 230. 23. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000) 45. 24. Waters, ed., Women and Men Political Theorists, 266. 25. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997) 17. 26. John J. Han, “Uncle Tom as Christ Figure,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt, The Ignatius Critical Editions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). 27. See Thomas J. Steele, “Tom and Eva: Mrs.