Description
| Product ID: | 9780195312973 |
| Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | Reluctant Race Men |
| Subtitle: | Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-Century America |
| Authors: | Author: Joan L. Bryant |
| Page Count: | 448 |
| Subjects: | History of the Americas, History of the Americas, History, History, Slavery and abolition of slavery, Military history, Civil wars, History of religion, History of ideas, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Slavery & abolition of slavery, Military history, American Civil War, History of religion, History of ideas, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, USA, c 1800 to c 1900 |
| Description: | Reluctant Race Men traces a history of ethical, philosophical, political, religious, and scientific challenges that Black American reformers lodged against configurations of race across the long nineteenth century. It reconstructs a largely ignored reform tradition showing race as diverse practices that configure human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness. Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing, grouping, and ranking humans into races became commonplace facets of activism in anti-colonization and emigration campaigns, suffrage and civil rights initiatives, moral reform projects, abolitionist struggles, independent church development, and confrontations with scientific thought on human origins. Denunciations persisted even as later generations of reformers felt compelled by theories of progress and American custom to promote race as a basis of a Black collective consciousness. Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation''s history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it. Reformers'' challenges call into question the notion that race is a self-evident site of identity among Black people. Their ideas instead spotlight legal, political, religious, social, and scientific practices that configured human difference, sameness, hierarchy, and consciousness. They show how a diverse set of actions constituted multi-faceted American phenomena dubbed "race." |
| Imprint Name: | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Publisher Name: | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2024-06-19 |