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Reluctant Race Men traces a history of ethical, philosophical, political, religious, and scientific challenges that Black American reformers lodged against configurations of race across the long nineteenth century. It reconstructs a largely ignored reform tradition showing race as diverse practices that configure human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: "Not a Difference of Species": Nationality and the Question of Representation
- Chapter 2: "That Odious Distinction": Moral Reform and the Language of Obligations
- Chapter 3: "One Common Family": Equality and the Logic of Authority
- Chapter 4: "Humanology": Difference and the Science of Humanity
- Chapter 5: "One Color Now": Freedom and the Ethics of Association
- Chapter 6: "Race-ship": Citizenship and the Imperatives of Progress
- Chapter 7: "The Whole Question of Race": Jim Crow and the Problem of Consciousness
- Conclusion: "Along the Color Line"
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Joan L. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
Summary
Reluctant Race Men traces a history of ethical, philosophical, political, religious, and scientific challenges that Black American reformers lodged against configurations of race across the long nineteenth century. It reconstructs a largely ignored reform tradition showing race as diverse practices that configure human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness.
Additional text
In Reluctant Race Men, Joan Bryant enters into the full complexity of US racial history- and, in doing so, she gets at the messy and often paradoxical work of advocating for African American rights and communities without further implicating Black Americans in the infernal logic used to control them. This is a fascinating and exemplary study of the challenging work of social and political advocacy in a nation engulfed by its elaborate and unstable fictions about race.
