Manifestations of Manhood: Constructing Masculinity in Gloria Naylor's The Men of Brewster Place

The article explores representations of African American inert and masculinities in Gloria Naylor's 1998 novel The Men of Brewster Place, and compares them to those in The Women of Brewster Place (1982). The analysis places the more recent novel in the context of literary and cultural debates about black women's agency and racial solidarity, and in the socio-historical contexts of the civil rights movement and the Million Man March. Because the novel incorporates competing and conflicting discourses on African American masculinity, Naylors representations of men in The Men of Brewster Place are wrought with ambivalence, caught between a critical problematization of masculine and masculinist ideals, and are-inscription of those ideals.