Marlon B. Ross – författare

Manning the Race explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Marlon Ross provides an intellectual history of both famous and lesser-known men who have served—controversially—as models and foils for black masculine competence.Ross examines a host of early twentieth-century cultural sites where black masculinity struggles against Jim Crow: the mobilization of the New Negro; the sexual politics of autobiography in the post-emancipation generation; the emergence of black male sociology; sexual rivalry and networking in biracial uplift institutions; Negro Renaissance arts patronage; and the sexual construction of the black urban folk novel. Focusing on the overlooked dynamics of symbolic fraternity, intimate friendship, and erotic bonding within and across gender, Manning the Race is the first book to integrate same-sexuality into the cultural history of black manhood. By approaching black manhood as a culturally contested arena, this important new work reveals the changing meanings and enactments of race, gender, nation, and sexuality in modern America.Manning the Race opens new approaches to the study of black manhood in relation to U.S. culture. Where previous books tended to emphasize how individual black men's identities have been reactively informed by the U.S. regime of race and sexuality, Manning the Race makes the case for understanding how black men themselves have been primary agents and subjects in formulating the identity and practices of black manhood.

Manning the Race explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Marlon Ross provides an intellectual history of both famous and lesser-known men who have served—controversially—as models and foils for black masculine competence.Ross examines a host of early twentieth-century cultural sites where black masculinity struggles against Jim Crow: the mobilization of the New Negro; the sexual politics of autobiography in the post-emancipation generation; the emergence of black male sociology; sexual rivalry and networking in biracial uplift institutions; Negro Renaissance arts patronage; and the sexual construction of the black urban folk novel. Focusing on the overlooked dynamics of symbolic fraternity, intimate friendship, and erotic bonding within and across gender, Manning the Race is the first book to integrate same-sexuality into the cultural history of black manhood. By approaching black manhood as a culturally contested arena, this important new work reveals the changing meanings and enactments of race, gender, nation, and sexuality in modern America.Manning the Race opens new approaches to the study of black manhood in relation to U.S. culture. Where previous books tended to emphasize how individual black men's identities have been reactively informed by the U.S. regime of race and sexuality, Manning the Race makes the case for understanding how black men themselves have been primary agents and subjects in formulating the identity and practices of black manhood.

How race and space shape one another in profound and often contested ways.How does race shape the spaces we inhabit, and how do those spaces, in turn, shape our perception of race? This book addresses these questions by bringing cultural theory into dialogue with the practices of design, planning, and architecture. Edited by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon B. Ross, the essays in this collection argue that racial identity is never separate from the landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments that are so familiar that we often fail to see their ideological and economic implications.The first two chapters, authored by Grandison and Ross, frame the theory and methods of what they term "critical landscape studies" with case studies on historic preservation and gentrification, respectively. The other essays build on this approach from different interdisciplinary perspectives—investigating further how race is embedded in the processes of planning, preservation, and urban development, and how spatial practices are never neutral terrains but instead represent contested cultural records. Contributors reveal how the vertical hierarchies of race—long defined by the extremes of whiteness and Blackness—are continually negotiated across the categories of gender, sexuality, religion, and diaspora. The volume also underscores how disciplines that have too often treated space as abstract or universal must confront its racialized dimensions with greater rigor, while design professions must attend to the cultural identities, material interests, and power imbalances that shape and are shaped by the environments they create.From university campuses to gentrifying neighborhoods and from sacred landscapes to sites of ecological struggle, the essays in this collection offer a timely and provocative critical analysis of how space and race interact and inform each other. It challenges readers to see how the politics of racial formation and representation are embedded in the landscapes that surround us, and how those built environments in turn influence cultural perceptions of identity and belonging.

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.