Performing Black Masculinity

Bryant Keith Alexander teaches in the departments of Communication and Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

• 1 Introduction: Exploring Modalities and Subjectiveness that Shape Social Relations2 Crossing Borders and Changing Customs: Moments When the Spectator Becomes the Spectacle3 Placement and Displacement of Black Identity: The Case of Migration across Borders from Campus to Community4 Passing, Cultural Performance and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity5 (Re) Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography, Performing Drag, and Feminist Pedagogy6 Fading, Twisting, and Weaving: An Interpretive Ethnography of the Black Barbershop/Salon as Cultural Space7 "Were/Are, Fort/Da": The Eulogy as Constitutive (Auto)biography (or, Traveling to Coalesce a Public Memory)

This is a vastly important book. In every chapter, the rich theoretical breadth of Alexanders's radically interdisciplinary thinking is meaningfully linked to a multi-sited ethnography and politics of human experience. Theory and practice are merged in Performing Black Masculinity to deepen and illuminate the "everyday" particularly the hidden complexities of race, sexuality and economies of belonging. This work is personal and political offering fresh, new insights to the relevance of autoethnography as a method of critical reflexivity that at its best is always already contesting both the small and the large machinations of injustice.