Brandon Manning received his BA in English from Jackson State University, and later received his MA and PhD degrees from Ohio State University where he was also a Bell Doctoral Fellow, a Summer Institute for Tenure & Professional Advancement Fellow, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow. Brandon is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas Christian University. His research interests include, but are not limited to: black masculinity in contemporary African American Literature, the construction of gender in African American literary satire, and the construction of race and gender in pop-culture. Phone: 8172574109 Address: TCU Box 297270 Fort Worth, TX 76129
This course serves as an introduction to black feminist theory and criticism. While we will look ... more This course serves as an introduction to black feminist theory and criticism. While we will look back to figures like Sojourner Truth and Zora Neale Hurston, we will begin in the late 70s moment with the rise of black feminist figures and theory. We will examine literature and theory of writers like Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Naylor, and others to understand how black feminist center themselves in a world that assumes that “all the women are white, and all the blacks are men.” We will seek the answer to questions such as: What is black feminism(s)? How has black feminism changed? How are broader initiatives in feminism expressed or embraced in black feminism? Beyonce?
This course will study the evolution of black masculinities through cultural, social, and politic... more This course will study the evolution of black masculinities through cultural, social, and political movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The course draws its critical energy from contemporary black feminist thought, black masculinities studies, queer theory and affect theory. The course will be organized by the interplay of black men’s power and resistance, structure and agency, and representation and performance. By examining representations and presentations of black masculinities, we will pursue questions such as: How has dominant society attempted to define black masculinities, and in what ways have black men undermined these narratives and redefined themselves? How do racial stereotypes about black men’s sexuality inform representations of black masculinities? Moving beyond heteropatriarchy and gender binaries, what is the future for black masculinities?
This course will study how recent scholarship in African American Studies helps to contextualize,... more This course will study how recent scholarship in African American Studies helps to contextualize, theorize, and illuminate police brutality, the continued contestation of black humanity, and the response of #BlackLivesMatter as a movement. The course draws its critical energy from literary scholars, historians, media scholars, law, and other related disciplines. By studying this scholarship we will pursue questions such as the following: How do Black Lives Matter? How does history inform the need for visibility? How do scholars, and academia more broadly, create sites for resistant scholarship to shift racial paradigms? How do gender and sexuality operate within narratives of police brutality and BLM’s response?
ABSTRACT This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matt... more ABSTRACT This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context for black liberation movements and other Black Lives Matter Syllabi. In addition, the essay attends to students’ difficulties in a course dedicated to analyzing black dispossession and death.
This chapter argues for the need of developing a “black feminist narratology” in order to underst... more This chapter argues for the need of developing a “black feminist narratology” in order to understand the complex role of the racialized narrator in Post-Soul fiction. Building off of the work of feminist narratology, this chapter applies the black feminist narratology – with its dual focus on race and gender – to ZZ Packer’s recent story “Brownies.” Packer’s satire works to emphasize the need for marginalized peoples to foster positive approaches to community identification, while also suggesting the need to develop such communal identification between reader and writer.
Abstract:Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban ex... more Abstract:Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films" The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnerability in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emotional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger—two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early '90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood.
In Skin Acts , Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black mal... more In Skin Acts , Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers—Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley—to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other—intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous—forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness.
This chapter discusses the implications of cultural production oftentimes associated with blackne... more This chapter discusses the implications of cultural production oftentimes associated with blackness by nonblack people, arguing that Adam Mansbach’s satirical novel Angry Black White Boy (2005) serves as an exploration into a postracial imaginary that thinks about the future of resistance and race in America. Mansbach creates this postracial imaginary by juxtaposing the ostensibly postracial, neo-passing site of his protagonist that is mistaken for black in the narrative with the protagonist’s white privilege. Unlike his protagonist, Mansbach utilizes popular tropes from black satirists—such as disrupting the notion of race, intraracial self-reflexivity, and an awareness that race is both socially constructed and a political reality—in nonappropriative and nonconsumptive ways.
This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Moveme... more This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context for black liberation movements and other Black Lives Matter Syllabi. In addition, the essay attends to students’ difficulties in a course dedicated to analyzing black dispossession and death.
Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences... more Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films” The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnera- bility in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emo- tional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger—two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early ’90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood.
This course serves as an introduction to black feminist theory and criticism. While we will look ... more This course serves as an introduction to black feminist theory and criticism. While we will look back to figures like Sojourner Truth and Zora Neale Hurston, we will begin in the late 70s moment with the rise of black feminist figures and theory. We will examine literature and theory of writers like Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Naylor, and others to understand how black feminist center themselves in a world that assumes that “all the women are white, and all the blacks are men.” We will seek the answer to questions such as: What is black feminism(s)? How has black feminism changed? How are broader initiatives in feminism expressed or embraced in black feminism? Beyonce?
This course will study the evolution of black masculinities through cultural, social, and politic... more This course will study the evolution of black masculinities through cultural, social, and political movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The course draws its critical energy from contemporary black feminist thought, black masculinities studies, queer theory and affect theory. The course will be organized by the interplay of black men’s power and resistance, structure and agency, and representation and performance. By examining representations and presentations of black masculinities, we will pursue questions such as: How has dominant society attempted to define black masculinities, and in what ways have black men undermined these narratives and redefined themselves? How do racial stereotypes about black men’s sexuality inform representations of black masculinities? Moving beyond heteropatriarchy and gender binaries, what is the future for black masculinities?
This course will study how recent scholarship in African American Studies helps to contextualize,... more This course will study how recent scholarship in African American Studies helps to contextualize, theorize, and illuminate police brutality, the continued contestation of black humanity, and the response of #BlackLivesMatter as a movement. The course draws its critical energy from literary scholars, historians, media scholars, law, and other related disciplines. By studying this scholarship we will pursue questions such as the following: How do Black Lives Matter? How does history inform the need for visibility? How do scholars, and academia more broadly, create sites for resistant scholarship to shift racial paradigms? How do gender and sexuality operate within narratives of police brutality and BLM’s response?
ABSTRACT This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matt... more ABSTRACT This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context for black liberation movements and other Black Lives Matter Syllabi. In addition, the essay attends to students’ difficulties in a course dedicated to analyzing black dispossession and death.
This chapter argues for the need of developing a “black feminist narratology” in order to underst... more This chapter argues for the need of developing a “black feminist narratology” in order to understand the complex role of the racialized narrator in Post-Soul fiction. Building off of the work of feminist narratology, this chapter applies the black feminist narratology – with its dual focus on race and gender – to ZZ Packer’s recent story “Brownies.” Packer’s satire works to emphasize the need for marginalized peoples to foster positive approaches to community identification, while also suggesting the need to develop such communal identification between reader and writer.
Abstract:Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban ex... more Abstract:Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films" The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnerability in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emotional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger—two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early '90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood.
In Skin Acts , Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black mal... more In Skin Acts , Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers—Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley—to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other—intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous—forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness.
This chapter discusses the implications of cultural production oftentimes associated with blackne... more This chapter discusses the implications of cultural production oftentimes associated with blackness by nonblack people, arguing that Adam Mansbach’s satirical novel Angry Black White Boy (2005) serves as an exploration into a postracial imaginary that thinks about the future of resistance and race in America. Mansbach creates this postracial imaginary by juxtaposing the ostensibly postracial, neo-passing site of his protagonist that is mistaken for black in the narrative with the protagonist’s white privilege. Unlike his protagonist, Mansbach utilizes popular tropes from black satirists—such as disrupting the notion of race, intraracial self-reflexivity, and an awareness that race is both socially constructed and a political reality—in nonappropriative and nonconsumptive ways.
This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Moveme... more This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context for black liberation movements and other Black Lives Matter Syllabi. In addition, the essay attends to students’ difficulties in a course dedicated to analyzing black dispossession and death.
Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences... more Black film directors in the early 1990s created visual representations of black urban experiences in predominantly impoverished areas described as hood films” The 1995 film Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray) used humor and laughter help to change the tenor of hood films from the early 1990s. This article explores the use of humor and vulnera- bility in the construction of black masculinities in Friday to argue that the subtle emo- tional labor throughout the film provides nuance to the gangsta rap iconography by depicting black life in the hood beyond the sites of grief and anger—two emotions that largely encapsulated the representations of black men in rap and film in the gangsta rap era of the early ’90s. The film indirectly centers the emotional lives of black men oscillating between joy, love, and fear as the necessary affective range of self-care and survival in the hood.
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