ENGL 803: Racial Misandry in American Culture

Professor Seulghee Lee

Fall 2023: Tuesday, 6:00 — 8:45

Course description:

This graduate seminar aims to do two things. First, we will outline the insurgent frame of Black Male Studies, specifically its premise that racialized maleness constitutes a particular site of embodied vulnerability to racial-sexual violence. This philosophical and archival focus on racial misandry, centering the historical victimization of Black men and boys, will be contextualized in relation to adjacent discourses in academic Black Studies, including Black feminism and Afropessimism. We will also consider the import of this framework for theorizing non-Black forms of racialized maleness, conceptualizing the racial misandry that shapes the phenomenologies of Asian American, Latino, and Indigenous maleness, in order to limn the comparative possibilities among men-of-color discourses under the rubric of Black Male Studies. Second, we will outline the potential for developing cultural-theoretical and literary-critical idioms in schematizing racial misandry. As Black Male Studies has primarily utilized empirical and quantitative methods, we will examine the possibilities of its deployment in cultural and literary heuristics. Primary authors we may read together include Carlos Bulosan, N. Scott Momaday, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; theorists covered may include David Eng, Abdul JanMohamed, Darieck Scott, Tendayi Sithole, Hortense Spillers, and Frank Wilderson. We will also host virtually Tommy J. Curry, the founder of Black Male Studies and author of its signal text, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017).