Past Event

Join us in congratulating our colleague Dr. Katharine Bausch on her new book “He Thinks He’s Down: White Appropriations of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era!

The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social change. As a result, several prominent white male pop culture figures sought out and appropriated African American cultural trappings to benefit from what they believed were powerful black masculinities.

In He Thinks He’s Down, Katharine Bausch reveals the intricate relationships between racialized gender identities, cultural appropriation, and popular culture during the Civil Rights Era. Drawing on case studies from three genres of popular culture – literature, fashion, and film – Bausch untangles the ways in which white male artists took on imagined black masculinities in their work in order to negotiate what it meant to be a man in America at this time. Through this negotiation, the power and privilege of whiteness and of masculinity was reinforced. (UBC Press)

Register here to receive the Zoom link