African American Identity Research Articles

MAURICE O. WALLACE and SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, editors. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Journal Article Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, editors. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity Get access Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, editors. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity.Durham: Duke University Press. 2012. Pp. 387. $27.95. The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012, Page 1709, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1709a Published: 06 December 2012

Katrina’s city? New Orleans, race, myth, forced migration and return

Hurricane Katrina was responsible for the displacement of the entire city of New Orleans. This article will consider the forced migration of the city’s inhabitants, focusing specifically on poor African Americans. In the aftermath, families were separated and relocated all across the United States, controversially referred to as ‘refugees’. This problematically evokes Harold Cruse’s idea of ‘domestic colonies’ as it aligns black identity with the notion of foreignness. The imposed dislocation of black American families cannot be divorced from the historical context of slavery; the image of the migrant wading through the water evokes stories of fugitive slaves taking to the Mississippi River in an attempt to escape capture. The evacuation was in part due to an inherently racist infrastructure, primarily and irrefutably based on class. Yet, in spite of this, many citizens chose to return. The article will consider the homecoming experience in relation to the mythical status of the city and its rich cultu al heritage; how the ‘pull’ factors outweighed the political and socio- economic realities. Using the documentaries, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee, 2006), and Trouble the Water (Deal and Lessin, 2008) along with the HBO series Treme (2010–2011), this article will explore forced migration and intransigence, the image of the migrant, and the narrative of return in relation to African American identity, mythology, history, race and class.

African American identity: racial and cultural dimensions of the black experience

Part 1. Theoretical and Methodological Issues in African American Racial Identity Chapter 1. Forty Years of Cross' Nigrescence Theory: From Stages to Profiles, From African Americans to All Americans Chapter 2. The Conceptualization and Measurement of Racial Identity and Racial Identification within Psychology Chapter 3. African American Racial Identity Research in Political Science: The Need for a Multidimensional Measure Part 2. African American Racial Identity and Psychological Well-Being Chapter 4. The Effects of Racial Identity on African-American Youth Well-Being: A Clarification of the Research and Meta-analysis Chapter 5. Black Identity and Well-Being: Untangling Race and Ethnicity Chapter 6. Black Racial/Ethnic Identity and Its Impact on Well-Being: Bridging Identity Theory and Racial/Ethnic Identity Research Chapter 7. When Racial Identity Matters: Stressful Events and Mental Health in Rural African American Adolescents Part 3. African American Racial Identity and Physical Health Chapter 8. The Role of African American Racial Identification in Health Behavior Chapter 9. Vascular Depression and African Americans: A Population at Risk Part 4. African American Racial Identity Development and Effects on Parents and Children Chapter 10. Black Like Me: The Race Socialization of African American Boys by Nonresident Fathers Chapter 11. Toward a Model of Racial Identity and Parenting in African Americans Chapter 12. African American Children's Racial Identification and Identity: Development of Racial Narratives Part 5. African American Racial Identity and Influence on Educational Behavior Chapter 13. Racial Identity as a Buffer to Discrimination among Low Income African American Adolescents: An Examination of Academic Performance Chapter 14. The Congruence Between African American Students' Racial Identity Beliefs and their Academic Climates: Implications for Academic Motivation and Achievement Chapter 15. The Influence of African American Racial Identity on Standardized Test Performance Chapter 16. An Exploration of Racial Identity among Black Doctoral Students Involved in Cross-Race Advising Relationships Chapter 17. The Relationship between African American Males' Collegiate Peer Support Groups and Their Racial Identity Development

Self-Striving and Black American Social Identity in the 21st Century

Self-striving is a reflective attempt to develop and maintain a positive sense of the social self and the racial group in the presence of racial discrimination. A major theme in this paper is that self-striving is a continuous effort to construct a prototypical model of black identity that is empowering. To conduct our analysis we use the Black American subsample of the 2001-03 National Survey of American Life (NSAL) and the supplemental self-administered mail re-interview of the NSAL. We use structural equation techniques to generate estimates for a proposed structural model, which estimates the direct and indirect influence of personal discrimination, systematic racial discrimination, and black centrality on positive aspects of black social identity. A major conclusion that we draw from our findings is that the interaction of personal discrimination and black centrality minimizes the potential for self-alienation.

Ethnic Identity, Questionnaire Content, and the Dilemma of Race Matching in Surveys of African Americans by African American Interviewers.

We used data from two telephone-administered health surveys to explore African Americans' preferences for interviewer race. The first survey utilized African American interviewers to assess ethnic identity and aspects of healthy eating among 617 African American adults. In the second survey, interviewers of varying races queried 534 African American adults about their motivations to eat healthier. The motivation survey contained almost no racial content, whereas 40% of the ethnic identity survey assessed racial content. Using ethnic identity survey data only, we found that respondents with Afrocentric or Black American identity components were more likely to prefer African American interviewers than respondents with solely Assimilated, Bicultural, or Multicultural identity components. Ethnic identity survey respondents were also more likely to prefer racially/ethnically matched interviewers than motivation survey respondents. Ethnic identity respondents with a college or graduate degree reported lower hypothetical comfort with a White interviewer than respondents with a high school education.

"Deserve Got Nothing to Do with It": Black Urban Experience and the Naturalist Tradition in The Wire

"Deserve Got Nothing to Do with It":Black Urban Experience and the Naturalist Tradition in The Wire Kecia Driver Thompson (bio) In the final season of The hbo series The Wire, a slight tension develops between Felicia "Snoop" Pearson,1 an experienced gangster and top soldier in the crew of drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, and Michael Lee, a boy barely in his teens whom Marlo has recruited to learn the ropes. While Snoop follows orders without questioning them, Michael often wants to know the logic behind the murders they commit, and Snoop grows exasperated with him. He is told in Episode Eight that his next job will be to kill a rival dealer, Big Walter, and, when he asks if Snoop ever wonders if the people they kill deserve it, she loses patience. "Deserve got nothing to do with it," she retorts, evoking the words of Will Munny (played by Clint Eastwood) in the 1992 film Unforgiven, just before he shoots Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). This scene in The Wire is rich with meanings. To begin with, Michael senses (correctly, it turns out) that something is not quite right this time and that he is about to be set up, although he is smart enough not to get killed. Instead of becoming a fully integrated member of this gang, he remains aloof and fits the type of the quiet outsider that so often appears in Westerns. The fact that he questions the rules and conventions of the game ultimately leads him to take up the gun-slinging mantel of Omar Little, an epic character with his own unique code of honor who robs drug dealers but never "citizens." The subtle reference to Unforgiven is significant in that the film (also directed by Eastwood) is a twist on the classic Western, both employing and undercutting many of the conventions of the genre, including the clear distinctions between the good guy in the white hat and the bad guy in black. What is most important in terms of this essay, however, is that this simple line from Snoop encapsulates one of the central tenets of literary naturalism: that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and there is no [End Page 80] stable or just order in the natural world that will ensure that we get what we deserve. In the context of The Wire, it is certainly true that young African American males like Michael cannot expect to make sense of the legacies of poverty, violence, and fear that they shoulder. In this essay, I propose that investigating The Wire as a naturalist text is appropriate and in line with recent critical inquiry in the field of naturalist studies,2 which shapes an understanding not only of the continuing impact of the movement but also of the texts that we might include in this tradition. A central preoccupation of naturalism, I argue, is mediation and, by extension, how character and identity are formed, displayed, experienced, and understood. Texts written at the turn of the twentieth century were influenced by, reflective of, and mediated through new technologies such as the printing press and print media, photography, and early cinema, as well as through shifting attitudes towards race, gender, social class, industrialization, and urbanization. Texts that are situated in the early years of the 21st century are at least as mediated—only through different technologies and systems. The Wire both represents and demonstrates the controlling influences of institutions: the legal system and the courtroom, the police and the law, local and state government, labor unions, the schools, prisons, and the mass media. The Wire is concerned with how these institutions watch us, shape us, frustrate us, and fail us. At the same time, however, it questions the authenticity of this representation; through the tensions between what John Dudley calls "performance and essence," melodrama and gritty realism, mediation and access, and even reception and context, The Wire displays its preoccupation with "what is natural or inevitable about African American identity and experience" (Dudley 258). Just as The Wire negotiates meaning between its predominately black docu-fictional world and its (arguably) mostly white audience, naturalist texts have a history of negotiating...

‘It's all the way you look at it, you know’: reading Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson's film career

This paper engages with a major paradox in African American tap dancer Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson's film image – namely, its concurrent adherences to and contestations of dehumanising racial iconography – to reveal the complex and often ambivalent ways in which identity is staged and enacted. Although Robinson is often understood as an embodiment of popular cultural imagery historically designed to dehumanise African Americans, this paper shows that Robinson's artistry displaces these readings by providing viewing pleasure for black, as much as white, audiences. Robinson's racially segregated scenes in Dixiana (1930) and Hooray for Love (1935) illuminate classical Hollywood's racial codes, whilst also showing how his inclusion within these otherwise all-white films provides grounding for creative and self-reflexive artistry. The films' references to Robinson's stage image and artistry overlap with minstrelsy-derived constructions of ‘blackness’, with the effect that they heighten possible interpretations of his cinematic persona by evading representational conclusion. Ultimately, Robinson's films should be read as sites of representational struggle that help to uncover the slipperiness of performances of African American identities in 1930s Hollywood.

Lorna Simpson: Gathered

The article is inspired by the latest work of Lorna Simpson, a Brooklyn-based artist. In her photoworks Simpson deals with the African American identity, exploring and challenging issues of gender, race and culture. In her show entitled “ Gathered ” and displayed at the Elisabeth A. Sackle Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum of New York in 2011, Simpson realizes two installations of black females photographic portraits. In the first installation Simpson exhibit a series of photo-booth portraits of unknown black women, bought on e-Bay and collected by the artist. The second one, May June July August 1957/2009 (2009), is made up by a series of black and white vintage snapshots of a young African American woman, posing for pinups: among them, the artist inserts her own portraits, acting the same poses of the unknown model. Linking personal memories with a fictionalized reconstruction of the past, the work exhibited in Brooklyn points a new direction of Simpson ’ s investigation on memory, truth and fiction.

Nord et Sud dans la construction de l’identité noire américaine : réflexions sur le Mouvement pour les Droits Civiques

The present article examines the role played by the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the construction of a national African American identity. Through the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it analyzes the Freedom Movement from a North/South perspective, showing that the Movement allowed the convergence and interaction of two specific black identities which had developed in the North and in the South in the wake of the Great Migration. After exposing the main characteristics of these two identities at mid-20th century, the article focuses on the evolution of SNCC and of a selection of its key members to demonstrate how the Movement absorbed and transformed distinctive features of black northern and southern cultures, giving birth, ultimately, to a new black identity in which North and South became united after an era of separate development.

Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future Underground, 1954-1968

On the South Side of Chicago in the early 1950s, jazz musician began a lifelong project to re-envision the relationship between music, technology, society, and African American identity. While the popular image of during much of his career was that of an offbeat, creative character at the margins of both mainstream and avant-garde jazz, a significant number of scholars in our time and place now see as a central figure in the era's African American embrace of science and technology. Ra's art, in this view, looked to both the past and future to re-imagine and claim new metaphorical and material spaces for the diaspora. The extraordinary collection gathered together in Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, curated by John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, and Anthony Elms, adds many layers to our understanding of and his work. The former exhibition is now a book. As an exhibition and a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated guide (Corbett, Elms, and Kapsalis), Pathways is a lost manuscript that chronicles fourteen years of a largely untold, subcultural history of Chicago's South Side. Pathways leads us through the marked transformation of a musician who began his career under the tutelage of Fletcher Henderson, one of the architects of the big band sound, but who during the 1950s, embarked on an extraordinary project to reinvent African American history and claim the technological future. This transformation is captured through the vast array of artifacts that Pathways gathers from Ra's Chicago years, that seminal period in which the themes that the musician and members of his sprawling band explored throughout their long careers first took shape. For example, a 1956 exhibition photograph of Ra, the mainstream jazzman, sitting stolidly at a piano, quickly gives way to a video of a late-1960s performance, with band members attired in elaborate Egyptian and outer-space costumes. The strongest aspect of this exhibition and guide is an expansive logic of inclusion that allows for revealing juxtapositions. Ephemera such as business cards, receipts, and letterhead sit alongside do-it-yourself (DIY) analog and electronic instruments, all of which document how Ra's artistic practice unfolded across several media and across many social contexts. In this light, the mundane becomes startling (a 1957 flier advertised a benefit dance for a Mayor of Bronzeville candidate with music performed by SUN RA [Sun God of Jazz]), just as the startling also becomes mundane (expense ledgers served as doodle pads for artists drawing album covers that explored themes of outer space and enlightenment). Indeed, the exhibition and guide wonderfully reveal many aspects of the art world that traveled through, and capture him variously as a working musician, outsized performer, Big Band leader, entrepreneur, and inventor. Pathways also makes clear the importance of Ra's collaborators and the city of Chicago to his artistic practice. The Chicago Afro-Futurist Underground included a host of musicians and artists such as Claude Dangerfield, who designed a number of album covers for the band, including many stunning outer-space landscapes that were never used. Meanwhile, long after moved to New York in the early 1960s, Alton Abraham, Ra'S business manager and co-owner of the El Saturn record label--one of the first musician-owned record companies--manufactured the band's albums in Chicago by relying on the city's independent, black-owned businesses (Corbett, Sun Ra 7-8). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Pathways forces us, as the best archival collections do, to reconsider our assumptions about Ra, his art, and his era. How do we explain Ra's founding, in 1951, of Thmei Research, a secret society dedicated to the study of the occult, Egyptology, the Bible, and new technologies? Or and Abraham's plans for a Saturn Records research center devoted to the Bible and outer space? …

INTRODUCTION

It is particularly fitting thatDu Bois Reviewwould publish a special feature titled “Varieties of Responses to Stigmatization: Macro, Meso, and Micro Dimensions.” In many ways, we can consider the management of stigma to be a quintessentially Du Bois topic. In his classical writings on double consciousness, this pioneering social theorist (2007) captured the complex psychological experience of managing a life where one feels divided within oneself. He focused specifically on African American identity defined by the tension of being two at once (American and Black): “The Negro ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 3).

Sociocultural Theories, Academic Achievement, and African American Adolescents in a Multicultural Context: A Review of the Cultural Compatibility Perspective

Several suggest that African American culture facilitates academic achievement, but others suggest that identifying with Black culture contributes to the gap by undermining the academic performance among youth. These opposing perspectives are labeled compatibility theories and incompatibility theories, respectively. A previous review of the cultural incompatibility perspective reveals limited support for those theories. The current review of the literature complements the previous review with substantial support for the cultural compatibility perspective. Implications for theory, research, and practice addressing the racial gap in by considering the cultural underpinnings of academic behavior in African American youth are discussed. Keywords: adolescence, African American, gap, multicultural context, racial disparities, sociocultural There is substantial evidence of differential patterns of between Black and White students in our nation's educational system - commonly referred to as the achievement gap. African American students tend to underperform in terms of lower grade point averages (GPA) and weaker aptitude test scores than White students. The 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed higher rates of school readiness for White children than African American students (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010). Research has also demonstrated that African American students have higher dropout rates from high school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002; Osborne & Walker, 2006). Even when African American students graduate from high school, according to Aud and colleagues (2010), they are less likely to enroll in and graduate from college. The long-lasting effects that academic gaps between African American and White students have had in the larger society warrant continued theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue. Academic is positively correlated with educational attainment (Hansen, Heckman, & Mullen, 2004) and educational attainment has a positive correlation with one's socioeconomic status (Pallas, 2000). Therefore, the continued existence of academic gaps will contribute to the persistence of racial inequality in other areas of life. Finally, empirical tests of to account for the Black-White academic gap have been growing, and increasing the knowledge base could have implications for policy and public opinion about reducing racial disparities in educational outcomes. Of particular interest and in need of further analysis are sociocultural about the Black-White gap in academic performance. These can be divided into competing explanations: some theorists suggest African American culture facilitates academic (Oyserman, Gant, & Ager, 1995; Spencer, 1999; Whaley, 2003); whereas others suggest that identifying with Black culture contributes to the gap by undermining academic performance (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Steele, 1997). The authors have categorized the conceptual frameworks reflecting these opposing perspectives as compatibility theories and incompatibility theories, respectively. In this article, the cultural compatibility perspective will be defined and evaluated by a review of the evidence in support of the following three major theories: (a) socially contextualized model of African American identity (Oyserman, Gant, & Ager, 1995); (b) phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (Spencer, 1999; Spencer, Dupree, & Hartman, 1997; Spencer, Noll, Stoltzfus, & Harpalani, 2001); and (c) the cultural-cognitive model of African American identity (Whaley, 2003, Whaley & McQueen, 2010). This review will include studies that assess the role of culture in a broader multicultural context. Finally, implications drawn from the empirical evidence for the Black-White gap will be discussed. …

Woman to woman

Professional female comedians frequently face harassment from male fellow performers and from male audience members who take a sexist attitude, essentializing women as psychologically and temperamentally unsuited to the profession of comedy. This paper examines a strategy that African American female comedians employ to overcome the obstacles they face in performing before mixed gender African American audiences. While implementing features that emphasize their African American and female identity, the comedians direct their performances toward women in the audience, employing features and practices comparable to those researchers associate with close female friends in conversation. Intensive use of a strategy that includes taking stances such as confidence sharing and using gendered terms to directly address female audience members establishes solidarity with the women who are listening. Having a large portion of the audience as allies discourages the occurrence of sexist harassment.

Still Waters Run Deep: The Complexities of African-American Identities and Political Attitudes

In this paper we argue that the conventional narrative of homogeneity in black public opinion masks variation in the attitudes individual blacks hold about their own communities, personal identities, and their sense of class-consciousness. Utilizing the 2008 CAAPS/ABC News Black Politics Survey, this analysis shows how core American beliefs undermine racial group solidarity while experiences of racial discrimination and feelings of political marginality reinforce communal values among African Americans. The analysis also documents sharp divides among African Americans regarding preferences for national versus racial identities, individual versus communal beliefs, and social class versus racial group attachments. Our analysis reveals that these divides in black opinion over the primacy of identities are conditioned by various factors, specifically the frequency of personal experiences with racial discrimination, attitudes toward racial identity, social class standing, residency in majority black neighborhoods, and financial security. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of heterogeneity in black public opinion for understanding American public opinion wit large.

The N Word

Despite the general societal ban on use of forms of nigger, a variant finds continued acceptance among some members of the African American community for intragroup self-reference. The present research employs quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from narratives by African American comedians to show that a variant of nigger that developed in the early African American community persists in the lexicon of African American English because it conveys a social meaning that is foundational in the identity of many African Americans. Use of this form allows a speaker to construct an identity representing awareness of the history of African Americans and practical knowledge of the nature and implications of the diaspora experience. The form has been productive in its capacity to convey a range of attitudinal stances related to its basic meaning, including solidarity, censure, and a proactive stance that seeks to bring about positive change.

Reconstructing the Big Easy: racial heritage tourism in New Orleans

This paper identifies the dominant narratives, themes, and marketing strategies that local tourism organizations and groups have used to promote racial heritage tourism in New Orleans. Drawing on ethnographic methods and qualitative data,I argue racial heritage tourism is a form of cultural production in which people construct and draw on past memories and current perceptions of racial discrimination and segregation to contest marginalization and fashion a racial identity. African Americans use racial heritage tourism as a set of discourses and practices to position themselves as stewards of New Orleans culture and therefore central to the process of ‘reconstructing the Big Easy’ as a distinctive place of African American identity and racial consciousness. The analysis focuses on the linkages between identity construction processes and the growth of heritage tourism and examines the ways in which tourism discourses can mobilize people to create new collective identities. Examining racial heritage tourism contributes to our general understanding of how racial identity is socially constructed and how collective representations of the past and present can promote the growth of heritage tourism.

Perceptions of occupational prestige: Differences between African American and White college students

The present study examined perceptions of occupational prestige among university students. One hundred and twenty-four African American and 174 White students rated the prestige levels of 36 occupations evenly sampled from the six RIASEC types and three levels of prestige. Results indicated that there was a significant difference in perception of occupational prestige. African Americans reported more prestige for R, S, E, and C occupations than did Whites. For African Americans there was a positive relation between endorsement of the centrality of African American identity and prestige ratings R, A, S, and E. These results suggest that perceptions of prestige vary across and within ethnicity and also provide additional insight into how prestige might influence African American students' occupational selection.

“… All of Cross”—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of the Edgefield District, South Carolina

African Americans were integral to the stoneware-manufacturing district that developed around Edgefield, South Carolina. Enslaved African Americans worked as potters at several of the Edgefield shops, and the most renowned potter of the district was an enslaved African American named Dave, who incorporated poetic verse onto some of the pottery he made, as well as other marks including an X and slashes. A cross mark was also associated with two of the potteries in the district where Dave had once worked: the Rev. John Landrum Pottery, and the subsequent operation of this pottery by Rev. Landrum’s son, Benjamin Franklin Landrum. This cross-in-circle mark, known as the Landrum cross, resembles the African Bakongo cosmogram dikenga. The Landrum cross, as well as Dave’s use of the X and slashes, may be representations of African symbols brought to the New World and found archaeologically in other settings and contexts. This paper looks at the African American presence in Edgefield, Landrum crosses, and Dave’s use of the cross mark, to examine the meaning of these marks and their potential expression of African American identity.

Race Issues and Conflict in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Religious Life: The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family

Introduction The recent plethora of studies on female religious congregations in the United States reveals countless occasions when vowed religious women suffered degradations and humiliations at the hands of a patriarchal church. Indeed, gender discrimination has so affected female religious communities that it is not an exaggeration to say that it has been a central element that has touched the history of each vowed religious community, almost without exception. For African-American female religious congregations, however, gender issues, although important, have played a secondary role to those of race. There are three communities of African-American sisters. The oldest are the Oblates of Providence, founded in 1828 in Baltimore. Next in longevity are the Sisters of the Holy Family, who list 1842 as their year of origin. The youngest are the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, founded in Georgia in 1916, but since 1924 centered in Harlem, New York City. All three congregations have distinct histories and unique charisms that differentiate them from each other. At the same time, they have much in common as a result of their African-American racial identity. Race is the distinguishing characteristic that has set them apart from other female religious congregations and has defined their place in American church and secular history. The racial prejudices of white Catholics, including those of the clergy and other female religious communities, forced these three black communities to develop strategies for negotiating with the dominant white power structure. This essay will address one of these communities, the New Orleans-based Sisters of the Holy Family. It will attempt to show how the three Holy Family cofounders negotiated with white church leaders in transforming their community from a society of pious women to a church-sanctioned, vowed religious congregation, when it seemed that the social mores of the time made such a transformation impossible. In

Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out (review)

Reviewed by: Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out La Donna L. Forsgren Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out. By Nadine George-Graves. Studies in Dance History series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010; pp. vii + 230. $29.95 paper. Founded in 1984 by artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in New York City, the performance group Urban Bush Women is the focus of Nadine George-Graves's important contribution to the field of African American dance studies. Originally consisting of seven black female dancers over age 30, Urban Bush Women continues to use the medium of dance to challenge the dominant white culture's construction of African American identity (and African American [End Page 290] women's identity, in particular). Thus an important early value of the company was to engage its core communities by "creat[ing] dances that showed how African Americans perform themselves" (11). Similar to past studies, such as Ananya Chatterjea's Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha (2004), George-Graves's book establishes the company's repertoire as culturally resistive. It breaks new ground, however, by drawing upon resources like original interviews, reviews, photographs, and George-Graves's own attendance at rehearsals and performances to document the complexity and significance of Urban Bush Women's repertoire. Situating Urban Bush Women as an important model of womanism, as defined by Alice Walker in the early 1980s, George-Graves identifies the group's repertoire as therapeutic, critically evaluating the company's commitment to audience engagement, the performance process, and the healing power of performance. George-Graves provides several examples of performances that led to healing. For example, dancer Vanessa Manley recalls in an interview the experience of a balding female audience member, a chemotherapy patient, who was so inspired by Hair Stories that, during the post-show discussion, she took off her wig and confessed that she didn't know why she was conforming to others' expectations of female beauty. Afterwards, the woman's daughter, who was also in attendance, hugged her mother and "told her that she was proud of her" (204). Hair Stories empowered this audience member not only to accept her body, but also to testify to others of her transformative experience. George-Graves contends that Urban Bush Women's performances not only are "unapologetic, provocative, and ultimately healing," but also politically engaging (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, she centers her scholarship on the concept of "working," arguing that Urban Bush Women's dances "attend to the bodies and souls of individuals and communities," and that healing occurs when "one works the roots, works the body, works the soul, works the tangles out" (4). Audiences are able to experience moments of healing when they both internalize provocative performance material to work on the inner self, and externalize those lessons by returning to their communities to "effect social change" (6). By using choreography to demonstrate the fluidity of racial identities, for example, Urban Bush Women "challenge their audiences to reimagine society and renounce old definitions of black dance, and indeed, black identity" (6). Urban Bush Women's performances also challenge audience expectations of dance. Incorporating a variety of choreographic styles, including West African dance, ballet, and modern dance, Urban Bush Women performances resist fixed categorization. In addition, the company's dancers play instruments, read poetry, and utilize other performance techniques, such as singing and acting. George-Graves notes, in fact, that "[m]any of the pieces require the dancers to create believable characters and deliver lines loudly enough to be heard over several booming drums" (29). While performing to the accompaniment of music, Urban Bush Women seeks to provoke its audiences, directly addressing them with its "emotionally charged" pieces in order to incite audience participation (29). Although George-Graves acknowledges that the company's provocative performances may be off-putting to some audience members, she argues that "what some find threatening is precisely the kind of stakes-raising necessary to create empowerment and effect change" (7). Among the strengths of the book are the detailed...