Building on recent scholarship that treats masculinities as historically produced and institutionally mediated, this panel turns to underused colonial archives to ask how masculinity was examined, authenticated, and destabilized across legal, medical, and cultural domains. Drawing on court petitions, criminal trials, and literary magazines, the papers show how masculinity emerged not as a stable attribute but as a status contingent on credibility, discipline, and embodied performance.

From Yoruba courts where men’s bodily capacities were subjected to evidentiary scrutiny, to Ogoja criminal cases in which rage was narrated as both loss of control and gendered expectation, to psychiatric petitions that recast madness as a crisis of male authority, the panel demonstrates how law and medicine functioned as technologies for verifying or undoing masculine legitimacy. Extending beyond West Africa, the examination of South African literary magazines reveals how aesthetic judgment and political solidarity produced a normative black artist masculinity while rendering women marginal to the archive. Together, these papers show that archives do not merely record masculinities; they reveal how institutions produced and stabilized them.

Treating court archives as technologies of verification, the first paper argues that masculinity in colonial Yorubaland was produced through evidentiary scrutiny. Sexual and reproductive capacity became juridical criteria of legitimacy, transforming intimate bodily uncertainty into public proof. Masculine authority was neither presumed nor biologically secured; it was substantiated, contested, and potentially revoked through adjudication, revealing masculinity as a contingent institutional achievement.

The second paper theorizes madness as a critical site where masculine authority fractured under colonial legal and psychiatric regimes. Drawing on court records, it shows how insanity destabilized paternal credibility, shifted domestic responsibility, and rendered male bodies objects of institutional classification. Madness emerges not merely as pathology but as a gendered crisis through which masculinity was redefined, disciplined, and spatially reorganized within regimes of confinement.

Analyzing 1960s South African literary magazines, the second paper reads anti-apartheid literary criticism as a site where black artist masculinity was discursively constructed and authorized. Reviews in the magazines elevated a politically conscious, realist, urban male persona as the normative embodiment of cultural resistance. Through aesthetic judgment, critics naturalized male authority while marginalizing women artists, demonstrating how cultural mediation and archival silence co-produced gendered legitimacy within oppositional publics.

Finally, the fourth paper engages criminal trials in colonial Ogoja Province to situate rage within a localized culture of emotions that shaped interpretations of violence and culpability. Rather than treating rage as a spontaneous impulse, the study argues that colonial courts transformed emotion into evidence, making it a structuring language through which authority, accountability, and gendered expectations were negotiated.

Together, these papers theorize masculinity and gender as institutionally produced formations, showing how archives operated as technologies that constituted belonging and identity in twentieth century Africa. Beyond African history, the panel appeals to scholars in legal history, medical humanities, masculinity studies, postcolonial theory, and archival studies, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding how regimes of verification continue to shape contemporary debates about legitimacy, mental health, and gendered citizenship in global discourses.