Constructing the Black masculine: identity and ideality in African American men's literature and culture, 1775-1995

Part one: Spectragraphia

On dangers seen and unseen: identity politics and the burden of Black male specularity

Part two: no hiding place

'Are we men?': Prince Hall, Martin Delany and the Black masculine ideal in Black freemasonry, 1775-1865

Constructing the Black masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the sublimits of African American autobiography

A man's place: architecture, identity and Black masculine being

Part three: Looking b(l)ack

'I'm not entirely what I look like': Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and the hegemony of vision; or, Jimmy's FBEye blues

What Juba knew: dance and desire in Melvin Dixon's Vanishing rooms

Afterword: "What ails you Polyphemus?": toward a new ontology of vision in Frantz Fanon's Black skin, White masks.