Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This collection of essays assembled by Kitossa (Brock Univ., Canada) rethinks and explores Black masculinities through a more contemporary gaze, consciously avoiding critiquing Black maleness to the extent to which it has been read as an "imitation of white masculinity." Drawing on a wide range of scholars who interrogate, deconstruct, parallel, and differentiate perspectives on Black masculinities in the US, Canada, the UK, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines, and India, this work provides a global perspective on conceptualizations of Black masculinity. Kitossa organizes the text into four sections: "Erotic Racism, Tropes, and Interracial Sex"; "What Does a Black Man Want?"; "National Culture, Transqueering Black Masculinities, and Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity"; and "The Other Other and the Black Man." The volume, "grounded in James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon's affirmations of Black maleness ... takes as its central focus the expansion of the erotic landscape that Black maleness makes possible: a landscape that is one of desire, horror, and terror ... as well as one of sexual caricature and misrepresentation" (p. xxi). This collection is comprehensive, insightful, theoretical, historical, and riveting in its exposure of the dangers and desires that Black masculinity poses in a global context.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This well-written volume analyzes the social and demographic transition of a historically Black community into a predominantly Latino community in South L.A. over the last five decades. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Pastor (both, Univ. of Southern California) employ an intriguing approach, providing qualitative insider narration of how relationships constantly changed through the transition and how they varied between first- and second-generation Latinos. Also notable is the extent of the data collected, consisting of almost 200 in-depth interviews with residents, including first- and second-generation Latino residents, long-time Black residents, and civic leaders. The authors detail different aspects of immigrant integration, arguing that viewing integration in terms of simplistic assimilation does not capture how two different groups integrate over decades in the same community. They instead emphasize day-to-day encounters between residents as more transformative temporal processes. This reviewer was impressed by these refined methods of studying community change and also realized that prior cut-and-dried conceptualizations of racial and ethnic encounters (such as Robert Park's four stages of race relations: contact, conflict, acculturation, and assimilation) may not be sensitive enough to capture an understanding of the day-to-day encounters between racial and ethnic groups sharing the same neighborhoods.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.