Gender, the Wars of Decolonization, and the Decline of Empires after 1945

During the post-1945 Wars of Decolonization, gender was often an issue of contestation. Colonial repression was based on a gender order that intersected with the constructed racial and social hierarchies in the colonies. The way imperial powers’ policies used and impacted gender relations to secure their rule must be taken into account in any study of the anticolonial struggle. The chapter argues that the Wars of Decolonization after 1945 were as much total wars as the First and Second World Wars. They, too, affected all areas of the economy, society, and culture. The struggle for liberation challenged the ideas of white manhood of the colonial powers and led to conflicts in the construction of male identity within the armies of the insurgents. One challenge was the fact that not only men, but also women actively participated in the struggle for national liberation, which undermined dominant ideas of the gender order and led to a reconsideration of gender relations during and after the conflicts.

Uneasy Rest the Masters

The maturation of the slave economy by the 1850s restricted opportunities for whites and provoked populist stirrings of discontent challenging planter rule. The cotton prosperity of the decade resulted in the pricing of good land and slaves beyond the reach of the bulk of the population, and the numbers of poor whites with neither land nor slaves rose to one-third of the free population. The color line blurred as poor whites were forced into competition with slave labor and miscegenation increased. Frustrated by shrinking opportunities, the sons of planters yearned to win glory and status as the South’s future leaders. To defend their jobs and white manhood, urban workers organized politically to protest the use of slave mechanics in the job market. Moral and economic opposition blocked efforts to widen slave ownership by lowering prices through reopening the African slave trade. The decade ended with new political groupings demanding greater political and economic power for non-slaveholders.

“A Taste for Associations”

This chapter explores how white male associations defined a new postwar identity for Natchez men, many of whom established local Lost Cause traditions. Freemasonry grew rapidly in the late antebellum era, with Mississippi showing the highest per capita rate of membership in the nation. Large numbers of white mostly middle-class men in search of a place to bond with other defeated Confederate warriors joined numerous Masonic orders and began forging new identities for themselves. The militia tradition in Natchez with its emphasis on competitive sports was another means of defining white manhood after the war. The Adams Light Infantry offered members a venue to bond with other men, while also initiating the white community’s first attempts to create a collective memory of the war. In their efforts to dominate public space and create memorial traditions, Natchez militia members also resorted to violent attacks against blacks they perceived as challenging white supremacy.

Black Masculinities on Trial in Absentia: The Case of Oscar Pistorius in South Africa

This article explores the social representation of black masculinities as violent in the globally publicized case of the murder by Oscar Pistorius of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. This murder and the subsequent media interest it generated highlighted the manner in which fear of crime in South Africa, particularly amongst certain sectors of the population such as white, male gun owners and gun lobbyists, (including Pistorius and his family members) contributed to assertions about their right to own guns to defend their families and possessions against this perceived threat. Such claims were made despite statistical evidence showing that black South Africans are more likely to be victims of violent crime than white South Africans. Drawing upon media coverage of the trial, this article critically discusses the intersection between masculinity and racial identity with a particular focus on gun ownership as a symbol of hegemonic white manhood, and the parallel construction of black masculinities as violent and dangerous. The Oscar Pistorius trial offers rich material for this analysis: his entire defence was based on the view that the intruder he feared was almost certainly a black man who, as a legitimate target for the use of lethal force in self-defence, deserved to die from the four bullets fired through a closed door. It is argued that in his absence, the black man was ever-present at the Oscar Pistorius trial as a threatening figure whose calling into being was revealing of how black masculinities continue to be represented, relayed and received in particular ways in post-apartheid South Africa.

Black President Bush

This chapter examines fictional depictions of African American presidents as a popular trope in U.S. film, television, and literature, as producing a discourse of “black presidentialism” that implicitly embeds a logic of passing that comes into relief in sketch-comedy performances by Richard Pryor and David Chappelle. This chapter argues that Chappelle’s “counterburlesque” as “Black President Bush,” which rearticulates George W. Bush’s Iraq War policy and its justifications rearticulates in terms of black hypermasculinity and street vernacularities, exposes how popular culture’s discourse of black presidentialism, in its post–Civil Rights era instantiations, invokes what the traditional passing narrative understands as the disconnect between its protagonist’s appearance and presumed essence of his or her identity, with acute attention to the role gender plays in racial semblance. In the case of the black president trope, that dualism is recoded as the tension between the abstracted white manhood of the office of the presidency and black masculine racial particularity.

I Fight for a Living

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

The Challenge to White Manhood

This chapter considers how the increase in numbers of African American men at the workplace brought differing and contentious visions of manhood to the automotive factory. White men, who had long dominated the better jobs, divided into two groups: those who strove for the respectability of high-paid union jobs and those who resented others, fearing the loss of their exclusive white privileges. When black men fought for workplace equity, the more conservative whites conducted racial hate strikes to protect traditionally “white” jobs. In reaction, African American workers conducted what might best be labeled “pride strikes” to gain access to better jobs and later to improve the inequitable situation of black women in the automobile factories. These workplace struggles involved robust clashes over differing visions of manhood.