Miron Clay-Gilmore

Black Male Studies has emerged as a new field of study that aims to correct contemporary theories of Black men and boys and provide a new conceptual grounding for future research into the sexual vulnerability of racialized male populations within Western patriarchal societies. This article introduces key concepts of Black Male Studies, as well as the literature base surrounding anti‐Black misandry, phallicism, and the role masculinization has in dehumanization and racialization more broadly. This article also analyzes foundational disagreements between Black Male Studies, Black masculinity theory, and Black feminist gender theory. The author concludes that Black Male Studies not only offers empirically testable and verifiable theories concerning Black men and boys, and racialized male populations more broadly, but can better explain historical processes and sociological findings concerning Black males than existent literature.

The following essay engages with the assimilationist proto-theodicy articulated by Magdalena Beulah Brockden, an enslaved African woman in the eighteenth century, as recounted in Seth Moglen’s article, “Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past.” While Moglen’s analysis foregrounds narrative as a genre within the corpus of slave literature, my inquiry centers on interpreting Brockden’s Lebenslauf, her memoir of Christian conversion, as a theodicy, a complex philosophical meditation on religion and politics. In addition, this essay undertakes a critical exegesis of C. L. R. James’s State Capitalism and World Revolution, focusing particularly on the concluding chapter, “Philosophy and State Capitalism.” In this section, James identifies rationalism and idealism as paradigmatic philosophies of subordination and managerial control, precisely because they misconstrue materialism, a similar pitfall of Brockden’s ontologically assimilationist theodicy.