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Andrew B. Leiter presents the first book-length study of the sexually violent African American man, or ôblack beast,ö as a composite literary phenomenon. According to Leiter, the black beast theme served as a fundamental link between the Harlem and Southern Renaissances, with writers from both movements exploring its psychological, cultural, and social ramifications. Indeed, Leiter asserts that the two groups consciously engaged one anotherAÆs work as they struggled to define roles for black masculinity in a society that viewed the black beast as the raison dAÆOtre for segregation. Leiter begins by tracing the nineteenth-century origins of the black beast image, and then provides close readings of eight writers who demonstrate the crucial impact anxieties about black masculinity and interracial sexuality had on the formation of American literary modernism. James Weldon JohnsonAÆs The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Walter WhiteAÆs The Fire in the Flint, George SchuylerAÆs Black No More, William FaulknerAÆs Light in August, Margaret MitchellAÆs Gone with the Wind, Allen TateAÆs The Fathers, Erskine CaldwellAÆs Trouble in July, and Richard WrightAÆs Native Son, as well as other works, provide strong evidence that perceptions of black male sexual violence shaped segregation, protest traditions, and the literature that arose from them. Leiter maintains that the environment of southern race relationsùwhich allowed such atrocities as the Atlanta riot of 1906, numerous lynchings, VirginiaAÆs Racial Integrity Act, and the Scottsboro trialsùinfluenced in part the development of both the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. While the black beast image had the most pernicious impact on African American individual and communal identities, he says the ôthreatö of black masculinity also shaped concepts of white national and communal identities, as well as white femininity and
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