In the 1930 novel Not without Laughter, Langston Hughes represents Black life in the Midwest through the experiences of Sandy Rodgers and his family in small-town Stanton, Kansas (a stand-in for Hughes’s childhood home of Lawrence, Kansas). Much of the criticism on Not without Laughter focuses on the influences of Sandy’s grandmother and aunts, but this chapter centers his father, Jimboy. While he rarely instructs Sandy on how to be a man, Jimboy models a Black blues masculinity that draws together multiple aspects of early twentieth-century American culture. By reading Jimboy within the novel’s Midwestern cultural and historical context, this chapter foregrounds him as a consequential figure within both the novel and Sandy’s life. Jimboy’s demeanor, musicality, and mobility suggest how Sandy might learn to cope with life in the modern Midwest – notably, however, in ways that do not align with the conventionally respectable aspirations of his female relatives.

Although Ralph Ellison’s work endeavors to recover a sense of agency for black men, critics have paid relatively little attention to gender per se in the work, focusing instead on the more prominent issues associated with race, such as self-definition and literary paternity, as though these categories exist independent of the discursive formations of gender that subtend them. Ellison's essays as well as his fiction provide illuminating glimpses into the role that masculinity plays in his conception of racialized agency. As in Invisible Man itself, this conception turns on symbolizing homosexuals and women as the abjected other of a properly gendered, properly agentive masculine black subject.

Smethurst argues that the Autobiography of Malcolm X has deep roots in earlier African American autobiography, particularly the Christian conversion narrative and the slave narrative, notably the three life narratives of Frederick Douglass. For Smethurst, the defining chiasmus of Douglass’s first autobiographical narrative, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” structures The Autobiography, too — at least until Malcolm’s integration into the structure, theology, and ideology of the Nation of Islam. Smethurst argues that The Autobiography also follows Douglass’s three life narratives in that each of the latter not only retells the story chronicled in the first narrative but also unveils Douglass’s evolving positions, his developing political literacy, through later political moments, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early rise of Jim Crow. The Autobiography does not project an end of the development with Malcolm X’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, but a continuing transition, his grappling with the rapidly changing domestic and international political and cultural environments of the 1960s.

This essay contests the prevalent view of Richard Wright as a proponent of violent black masculinity.  Beginning with Uncle Tom’s Children, I argue, Wright provides a radical critique of the very ‘macho’ violent wish-fulfillment he has been accused of endorsing.  Stories such as "Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down by the Riverside," "Long Black Song" and "Ethics of Living Jim Crow" underscore the cruel ironic bind of black masculinity under Jim Crow: Black male children can be punished as “men” for the slightest perceived misstep, even while grown Black men are forced to assume the permanent position of “boys,” forever deferential to white authority.  Wright confronts us with the trauma of black male vulnerability, while also interrogating the complex and contradictory psychological reactions and socio-political responses such vulnerability gives rise to.  His work grasps the impulse to black masculinism as an understandable response to the particular historical circumstances of Jim Crow, while at the same time underscoring the strategic liability of such violent and individualist reactions.  Ultimately, Wright suggests that it is only the concerted response of the larger black community that offers black boys and men alike a chance of meaningful resistance.