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Wilder Dissertation FINAL.pdf (131.28 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Black Men in No Man's Land: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship in World War I Literature

Wilder, Blake Aaron
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494173609167138

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Nearly 400,000 African Americans served in the U.S. Army during the First World War. At the same time, white servicemen survived wartime injuries at an unprecedented rate. My dissertation explores how these trends reflect a cultural moment that disrupted Jim Crow narratives about race and masculinity. Through an investigation of scenes where black and white men confront each other, both on and off the battlefield, my project reveals that wartime disruptions engendered new formations of race and masculinity as legible identities. I argue that new depictions of black men as assertive or heroic challenged the reductive stereotypes that were used to justify the oppressive practices of lynching and disenfranchisement. And I contend that the depictions of white men as wounded and in need of assistance offered new possibilities for how Americans might relate across the color line. Analyzing scenes where black and white men are brought face-to-face by the movement and disruptions of warfare, my project suggests that these newly legible identities could be deployed to represent a more racially inclusive version of American democracy. Scenes of black and white soldiers meeting in no man’s land allow African American authors to reframe the battlefield as a space where Jim Crow racism is defeated through interracial cooperation, while depictions of assertive black masculinity appear as uneasy corollaries for white masculine insecurity in modernist texts. The tensions between white and black masculinities culminate in scenes of confrontation, and the lynching of the black soldiers becomes a symbol for the erasure of the black soldier as a recognizably a heroic figure. My comparative analysis of texts by black war veterans, established figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and famous white modernists complicates the overlapping timelines of the Lost Generation, the Jazz Age, and the Harlem Renaissance by foregrounding the interdependence of blackness and whiteness in this moment of American culture. Although the eventual re-normalization of white masculinity has obscured those World War I disruptions that allowed white and black Americans to imagine new ways of being in the world, my project recovers a period when social turmoil allowed black men to be viewed in new, more positive ways.
Ryan Friedman (Advisor)
Jared Gardner (Committee Member)
Andrea Williams (Committee Member)
318 p.
American Literature
African American Literature, World War I

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wilder, B. A. (2017). Black Men in No Man's Land: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship in World War I Literature [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494173609167138

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wilder, Blake. Black Men in No Man's Land: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship in World War I Literature. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494173609167138.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wilder, Blake. "Black Men in No Man's Land: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship in World War I Literature." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494173609167138

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1494173609167138
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.