Re-Imaging the Black Woman's Body in Alexis DeVeaux's The Tapestry

Abstract

Whether in her short fiction works like Adventures of the Dread Sisters or in her woman-centered, collaborative play No!, poet/playwright/fiction writer Alexis DeVeaux challenges hegemonic representations of race and gender. In DeVeaux's The Tapestry, for instance, the black woman's body functions as a site of gender and cultural confrontation on at least two distinct levels. Against the first level of contestation — that of the black woman's body as a sign of cultural and gender accommodation — DeVeaux posits a second, more pervasive imaging of the black woman's body as a signifier of strength and survival. Though at first glance, the second image seems a newer, late twentieth- century revisioning of black womanhood, in fact, as this paper will argue, it is a re-imaging of previous historical images of the black woman's body. This paper discusses DeVeaux's use of gestures and other movements (stooping, bending, leaning, etc.) within the historical context of the visual representations of black women's bodies.