Book Review: Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature

Over the past decade or so, masculinity has become a subject of continuing critical and theoretical fascination in the academy, and there is now a burgeoning subfield of work on the subject of black masculinity alone. This growing body of scholarship on black masculinity has developed in part in recent years because critics have increasingly understood the status of race in masculine formation and the importance of looking beyond white men as a normative category. Michael K. Johnson offers a revealing and admirable study of black masculinity in relation to a topic that has ordinarily been presumed to be incompatible with black male identity formation: the American frontier. His study, a timely one that should prevent us from ever making this assumption again, makes a valuable and unique contribution to contemporary critical and theoretical dialogues on black masculinity