Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory - (New Studies in Southern History) by Matthew Mace Barbee (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory, Matthew Mace Barbee offers an in-depth analysis of Richmond's Monument Avenue from its origins through 1996 and pays special attention to the impact of Civil Rights struggles on Monument Avenue.

Book Synopsis

In Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory, Matthew Mace Barbee offers an in-depth analysis of Richmond's Monument Avenue from its origins through 1996 and pays special attention to the impact of Civil Rights struggles on Monument Avenue.

Review Quotes

Barbee lays the foundation for a thorough analysis of the debate over the installation of the Ashe monument. Barbee analyzes this debate well. . . . Barbee is convincing in his argument that the direct, racist power of the monuments has waned and that despite the efforts of neo-Confederates, the Lost Cause ideology that gave birth to Monument Avenue has become a residual culture. . . .[This] case study is an important and suggestive framework for scholars.

Barbee provides a detailed and thoughtful account of struggles over public memory in the civil rights era. Indeed, for many of the events examined, his is the most thorough investigation to date. . . .Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory makes important contributions to the study of historical commemoration in the recent South.


In his rich narrative of Richmond's Monument Avenue, Matthew Barbee vividly re-animates its statues with the debates over their meanings and purposes in a city struggling with race and memory. As Barbee reveals, monuments carry significant emotional and symbolic weight, revealing to his critical eye the ways in which people imagine themselves and their society. What is important about this study is not what it relates about the past, but what it says about the challenge of living up to the nation's democratic ideals when sectionalism and racial inequality have been set in stone.

Much more than the history of an avenue, Matthew Mace Barbee's Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory: History of Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenue, 1948-1996 offers an exhaustive, sophisticated, and not infrequently provocative account of the civil rights struggle in one of its seemingly more genteel locations. This book manages not only to attend to very local circumstances but also to show the national implications--especially for African American politicians coming after Doug Wilder--of this former Confederate capital's struggle over its legacy.

About the Author

Matthew Mace Barbee is chair of the English Department at Siena Heights University where he teaches courses on U.S., African-American, and multi-ethnic literatures.