Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory , and: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern , and: Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, and: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, and: Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage Audrey Thomas McCluskey (bio) Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 208 pp., $40.00 cloth, $25.95 paper. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern by Jayna Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 339 pp., $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paper. Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage by Susan Thomas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 264 pp., $40.00 hardcover. What these three books have in common is their intent. That intent is to bring new insights and fresh perspectives to topics that have not only influenced popular culture, but, in some instances, have become infused into our racial imaginary. Black women as mammies, international entertainers, and as the force behind the development of the most popular form of entertainment in pre-revolutionary Cuba are the subjects in these timely new tomes. Yet these works are also very different and deserve to be considered on their individual merits. When Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy, the devoted slave/servant in Gone with the Wind (1939), she said in her joyous acceptance speech that she wanted it to honor black womanhood and to be "a credit to her race." The twofold reaction of black leaders, who praised this breakthrough for a black actor but criticized the sassy though subservient character she portrayed, reflects the contradictions that are present in this weighted emblem of Americana. Who is Mammy and where did she come from? How did she come to embody the heavy burden of racial mythology and history? These are questions at the core of Kimberly Wallace-Sanders's Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory on this perennially haunting figure in the American imaginary. The staying power of Mammy's larger-than-life persona is fraught with all manner of psychological attachments and racial yearning. Her healthy pulchritude and happy visage have evoked both scorn and praise, while serving as an inspiration for visual artists such as Betye Saar, Murray De Pillars, and Andy Warhol, and as the subject of scores of literary renderings. The fixation on Mammy and its hold on the American psyche is a "troubled marriage of racial and gender essentialism," mixed with mythology and Southern nostalgia, Wallace-Sanders argues. A professor at Emory University in Atlanta, she has been collecting mammy stories for many years. Her book is an attempt to sort through the stories and images and show how this incarnation of myth, biography, fiction, history, and culture merge to correlate with phases of America's race consciousness. [End Page 213] More than a racial stereotype that simply offends right-thinking people, the mammy figure has served as the complex site of a Foucaultian contestation over the black woman's body—as mother and woman. Since "mammy" first appeared in Southern usage in 1810, the term quickly became the name that referred to all black women who cared for white children. Wallace-Sanders's research builds upon the work of K. Sue Jewell (From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond, 1993) and Michael Harris (Colored Pictures, 2003) and others who have distinguished between images of black women as Mammy and Aunt Jemima. These recurring figures in American popular culture have been examined by other scholars, including Patricia Hill-Collins and Deborah Gray-White, known for their prodigious work on black womanhood. Wallace-Sanders's very focused study extends this work and provides her most important point, which is that the omnipresent image of Mammy belies its changing nature. Using an approach she calls "literary archeology," the author presents a chronology of the mammy figure to deconstruct its shifting semantics from the early 1800s to the present. She also aptly summarizes the myriad black response and resistance to the mammy figure over time, including a discussion of Alice Randall's satiric and controversial novel The Wind...