Black Female Character Research Articles

Too Good to be White: A Journey to Lose Identity in Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The history of African-American is a record of struggle for the right of existence and acknowledgement. An integral part of that struggle is the enforcement of the values and standards of the dominant ideals of white culture that made it impossible for African-Americans to hold on their identity. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison focuses on the difficulties, facing women, in obtaining identity and self esteem in a society dominated by white ethnocentrism. This paper aims at displaying the hardships and challenges of Black female characters in a world dominated by a complicated system of race, class and sex oppression which is seen as a threat to black women and their survival. Keywords: African-American Literature, cultural ideals, identity, internalized racism, white ethnocentrism.

“Evil Women” and the Paradox of the “Mother Earth” in Lara Foot Newton’s Tshepang: The Third Testament

Existing narratives in African literature have substantiated the precarious positions and positioning of female characters who, often times, are constructed as “evil,” monstrous, vindictive, etc. Whereas other artistic productions sympathetic to the conditions of women in African literature have tried to neutralise this despicable femininity through the configuration of effective, productive, urbane and positive social and political female agency, the notion of “evil women” still looms large. Black female characters in South African drama are burdened, in multiple ways, beyond the idea of race and ethnicity, as they are subjected to the whims and caprices of socio-cultural, political and economic disadvantageous orders. It is given the foregoing that this article seeks to interrogate the construction of “evil women” in Lara Foot Newton’s Tshepang: The Third Testament. Using the attributes and manifestations that inhere in the symbolism of “mother earth” in Africa, which has been successively violated and remains divided against itself, the article argues that the commodification of a notable female character in Tshepang: The Third Testament, Margaret, has a negative impact that nurtures evil in her. Margaret is accused of starting the circle that eventually leads to the rape of Baby Siesie (Tshepang) by Alfred Sorrow, who was abused earlier by Margaret. Relying on the manifestations of ecocriticism as they relate to the interrelation between humans and the environment, the article submits that what obtains in most African societies is the reality of an “evil environment,” and by extension an “evil society,” as the proposition of an “evil woman” cannot stand, being that, just like the unpleasant reactions of “mother earth” to the people who degrade her, what the “evil woman” manifests is an aggregation of the treatment meted out to her. The article concludes that caution is required from all players to tame acts of evil in post-apartheid South African society.

Enchanted consumption and the gift(s) of diaspora

This article explores consumption practices in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House (2007), which it reads as a macroeconomic critique. This critique repositions “diaspora” as a concept with a distinctive lineage in modern and contemporary migration literary narratives that articulate alternative models of economic exchange through representations of food and eating. In my reading, diaspora is not only a sociological group orientation or a conceptual lens on the interiorized subjectivity arising from involuntary migration; it is also a set of alternative economic practices that confront global commodity culture through quotidian acts of consumption. Marshall and Oyeyemi both employ the literary device of “enchanted consumption” to contest the premise of consumer passivity found in traditional models of commodity fetishism. Enchanted consumption accomplishes this by overlying global material exchange networks, local embodied consumption practices, and generic alternations between realism and fabulism. When read together, these three elements in particular suggest an under-examined economic dimension of diaspora that challenges dominant systems of valuation and exchange through the enactment of alternative gift economies. More specifically, Marshall and Oyeyemi depict black female characters struggling with choices about foodstuffs. This specificity is important, as it suggests that enchanted consumption derives most directly from the experiences of women in African diasporic culture. By including food in the constellation of other concerns faced by these women (domestic labour and childbirth, in particular) and, further, by understanding their consumption of food as a critical commentary on exchange systems, these authors disclose how the deeply personal consumption acts of black diasporic women advance an embodied critique of transnational capitalism that connects the globally dispersed sites of diaspora through local, gift-oriented approaches to food.

Dat Black Girl Magic!

595 DAT BLACK GIRL MAGIC! REVIEW-ESSAY Isiah Lavender III Dat Black Girl Magic! Diana Adesola Mafe. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. ix+173 pp. $27.95 pbk. Sami Schalk. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. vii+180 pp. $89.95 hc, $23.95 pbk. The ongoing colored wave of sf—perhaps now better thought of as alternative futurisms—continues to gain influence in literature, film, television, comics, and online media. The 2018 Hugo Awards serve as incontrovertible proof of this claim (as do the 2018 Nebula Awards): N.K. Jemisin won for best novel, Rebecca Roanhorse won for best short story, and Marjorie M. Liu (writer) and Sana Takeda (illustrator) won for the best graphic story. While she did not win a Hugo, Nnedi Okorafor won the WorldCon award for best YA novel, and Roanhorse was also honored with the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Additionally, at least eight other people of color were nominated for Hugo Awards across the categories: Yoon Ha Lee (twice), Nnedi Okorafor, JY Yang, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (twice), Aliette de Bodard, Caroline M. Yochim, Saladin Ahmed, and Jordan Peele. Scholarship has followed, even if a bit belatedly. At least thirteen monographs focused on representations of race and ethnicity in speculative literatures have been published since 2010, in addition to seven edited collections. In keeping with the Black Girl Magic social movement started by CaShawn Thompson’s hashtag in 2013,1 referenced in my title, this review considers two black-authored studies of race and racism in sf: Diana Adesola Mafe’s Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV and Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Diana Adesola Mafe makes a solid contribution to this expanding field by exploring depictions of black femininity on both big and small screens, in what is the first published study on this subject. Writing in an accessible style, Mafe begins her study with Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) of the original STAR TREK series (1966-1969) as her model, and she concludes the book with further analysis of Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot (2009) and its sequels.2 Noting how black actresses in speculative-fiction roles usually reinforce white patriarchal authority and tend to be eroticized like the character Lisa (Rosalind Cash) in Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), Mafe demonstrates how such portrayals establish and cement stereotypes of black women in genre films throughout the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. Mafe suggests that such stereotypes make black women largely invisible to the critical 596 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) eye, functionally erasing black womanhood from sf for roughly forty years while continuing to promulgate social prejudices. In this book, however, Mafe centers on black femininity in her discussion of recent American and British film and television, arguing for their significance in reimagining social constructions and agency by drawing on critical race, film, postcolonial, and gender theories. She examines subversive black female characters from the twenty-first century in four films—28 Days Later (2002), AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), Children of Men (2006), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—and two television series—Firefly (2002) and the third series of Doctor Who (2007)—all directed by white men. Five chapters and a coda follow her introduction. She splits her case studies evenly, providing close readings of three British and three American offerings, without claiming to be undertaking an exhaustive survey. Her readings proceed in chronological order of release dates. Mafe’s introduction, “To Boldly Go,” lays out the premise of her book: to examine representative black female characters in sf to correct their omission from visual culture. Smartly recognizing Uhura as “the symbolic face of black women in science fiction,” Mafe taps into the seemingly limitless possibilities of raced/gendered representation in sf to destabilize the stereotypes of black femininity (1). By considering the black female characters in the...

Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Preface Rick Bonus In our daily lives we tend to inhabit space almost all the time in imperceptible ways. Amidst all the flurry of working, playing, of doing whatever, our minds are oftentimes not attuned to space’s configurations, qualities, even histories. It’s as if our spaces are meant to be this way, to be unnoticeable. We take space for granted, even though we live in it and exist through it. Until, that is, when space’s effects on us become manifest, or when we become intentionally cognizant of the ways we think, act, and live within our space. The five essays in this JAAS issue are invitations for us to pay attention to that which we usually ignore. They are invocations to perceive and read space in its myriad forms, facets, and functions—a way of providing spatial mindfulness and space-conscious analysis of selected elements of Asian American lives. Our lead essay, James McMaster’s, “‘But You Have to Do Something,’” parses both the form and content of a play—the space of staged performance, if you will—to mine the possibilities of having to deal with public violence. Analyzing Julia Cho’s Office Hour, a theatrical production stirred by the Virginia Tech massacre, McMaster offers the potentials of considering “racialized holding environments” as space-time providers of momentary care and therapy, akin to being in the eye of a storm. One of our reviewers noted that this essay tackles “exceptionally pressing issues that deserve attention from academics in multiple disciplines.” I agree. Our second piece, “Family Business: The Work of Asian American Child’s Play,” contributed by Tara Fickle, provides a different, but related, reading of “play” not so much as theatrical performance (although indeed it may well be) but as recreational activity. For Fickle, however, her analysis of selected Asian American texts points to recreation’s deeper, more provocative, [End Page v] reference not merely to its evocation of an enjoyable activity, but rather to the intersecting activities of play and work in the lives of Asian American adolescents. In this regard, Fickle’s astute reading of play as a set of sites of racialized labor formation enables us to rethink it not in opposition to but actually as constitutive of work. Youngsuk Chae’s “Postmodern Ecology” approaches environmental critique by walking us through Ruth Ozeki’s famed novel All Over Creation, detailing within it the logic of a global economic crisis that is produced mainly from biotechnology’s production of what is referred to as “simulated nature.” Certainly, Chae cues us to the emergence of space/environmental justice movements in Asian American communities and, in particular, in Asian American literature. These are ominous, yet hopeful, signs that our livable spaces need urgent intentional attention. If literature can be used as a space of contemporary critique, we know that it can be utilized as well to peer into historical space-time representation. Caroline Yang’s literary analysis is one example. In her essay Yang takes us into Sui Sin Far’s early fiction works, particularly those that depicted the lives of Chinese women slaves and Black female characters, to indicate the enduring influences and “afterlives” of slavery that perpetuated antiblack racisms in U.S. literature. There is a revelation here, in this new reading of Sui Sin Far’s work, of literary space as “a critical site of struggle over the meaning of slavery in empire,” according to Yang, that will make us rethink a more celebratory rendition of that space. I’m sure this provocation will be productive for us. Our final essay, Joseph Jeon’s “Breakfast at Kuniyoshi’s,” calculates photography as a “space” of erasure, double-edgedly a site that produces and may well be productive of historical amnesia, in reference to Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In this sense Jeon’s piece is a historical reading, indeed a historical representation, of racial formation during the moment of Japanese postwar economic reconstruction and the galvanization of U.S. imperial power in Asia and the Pacific. To me it is a fitting bookend for our journal issue that limns space from multiple...

Rubies in the crown: A conversation on racial representation in Canadian theatre with Karen Robinson

Karen Robinson is one of Canada’s leading black actresses. Over the past twenty years, she has figured in more than 40 theatre productions, as well as in national and international TV series and films. A race-conscious artist actively engaged in portraying diverse representations of blackness on and beyond the Canadian stage, Robinson has acted in black-authored plays that have risen to canonical status, embodying memorable black female characters such as Billie in Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet and Esther in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. In this interview conducted in July 2016, Robinson shares some memories of the 2006 production of Harlem Duet at the Stratford Festival (Ontario, Canada), as well as her views on acting, colourblind casting, the revolutionary power of black women’s theatre, and the social relevance of individual and collective acts of resistance in a predominantly male, white-dominated cultural arena.

Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...]

Domestic Unrest

This article explores figurations of social reproduction in Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames. Beginning with the film's representation of the Wages for Housework movement, the article then places the film into dialogue with theoretical analyses authored by Black Women for Wages for Housework in order to advance two related arguments. First, Born in Flames indexes conflicting temporalities of struggle between feminist militant violence and social reproduction in ways that provide a self-reflexive meditation on the antagonisms that pervade the work of coalition-building. The film illuminates how sustaining feminist community depends upon an uneven distribution of work enacted by its black female characters, and therefore underscores fissures between multiracial coalition and black feminist freedom dreams. Second, Born in Flames re-imagines ‘housework’ and ‘the domestic’ against their dominant associations with white domesticity, thereby recasting the domestic as an internally differentiated site of struggle and offering glimpses of a black feminist domestic vision.

Montré Aza Missouri, Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity

Reviewed by: Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity by Montré Aza Missouri Maria Abegunde Montré Aza Missouri, Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2015 Montré Aza Missouri’s Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity asks readers “to consider how race, sex, and religion [intersect] in constructing a cultural identity for African Diasporas in the United States” (1), with specific attention to the cinematic transformation of the Tragic Mulatto into the Black Magic Woman. Missouri traces this journey through six chapters that deconstruct Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991), Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons, 1997), Sankofa (dir. Haile Gerima, 1993), I Like It Like That (dir. Darnell Martin, 1994), and The Princess and the Frog (dir. Ron Clements and John Musker, 2009), respectively, based on African-based religious images and practices that are embedded in the films and the sociopolitical and cultural issues that shape the black female characters. While each chapter presents a brief historiography of black films and the ways in which Hollywood has consistently made black women invisible, hypervisible, or grotesque, the real strength of Black Magic Woman is its Afro-religious reading of the five films: Missouri decodes the multilayered meanings of the Yoruba pantheon to demonstrate how knowledge of these codes, embedded by directors and manifested through characters, allows audiences to recognize the transformation of the Tragic Mulatto from her liminal position in history to the Black Magic Woman who is grounded in her African heritage. In addition, Missouri’s integration of a womanist theoretical framework demands that readers and viewers adopt a “womanist gaze,” that is, [End Page 247] rewatch and reevaluate films with which they are familiar from the historical, cultural, lived, and spiritual experiences of black women (48). Chapter 1 introduces Missouri’s theoretical framework and her argument that the qualities of a womanist film include a focus on “spirituality, particularly Afro-religiosity, as it informs the narrative, characterization and/or aesthetic” (29). When these qualities are present, she suggests, the womanist film makes the Black Magic Woman central to the narrative and reveals her power through the female orisas; both are “female warrior[s] battling social injustices and fostering social change” (3). The exploration of the films in chapters 2 through 6 evolve from Missouri’s chapter 2 analysis of why and how Daughters of the Dust is the “quintessential womanist film” (50): twenty-five years after its initial release, it remains one of the few films in which the power of àjé, the Yoruba collective feminine energy, is visible in all aspects of the narrative. In addition, Missouri argues that the egungun/ancestors, orisas (e.g., Osun and Yemanja), aiye/earth, and òkun/sea manifest through each character as the women resist succumbing to grief and trauma by claiming their diverse heritage and loving the “grotesque” aspects of themselves. It is this resistance that allows the female characters to be a community of Black Magic Women who, even as some embrace Christianity, are capable of healing their wounded bodies, psyches, and spirits. Although the theme of black women as spiritual healers is central to Eve’s Bayou, in chapter 3 Missouri argues that “murky mysticism” under-cuts this element and that the film utilizes stereotypes of black women, femininity, and the black middle class to progress its narrative (81). In contrast to Daughters of the Dust, whose characters use the àjé, egungun, and orisas to make their wounds visible and to confront their histories, the characters in Eve’s Bayou, according to Missouri, are “motivated by fear of loss” and use voodoo (instead of practicing Vodou) to seek revenge without imagining an alternative community (91). Similarly, in chapter 4 Missouri argues that Sankofa’s Black Nationalist approach leaves little room for a complex rendering of black women and, like Eve’s Bayou, frames its narrative through stereotypes. Furthermore, despite the film’s integration of egungun and orisas, Missouri points out that those manifestations are limited and are accompanied by the continued sacrifice and eventual death of the protagonist, Mona/Shola. True to Missouri’s objective to explore the...

Highlighted & Underlined

A new report by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future calls for a new system of teaching and learning. The Glossary of Education Reform is a good resource for educators. A new web sites has organized books that have black female characters. New survey explores beliefs of teachers and parents who joined opt-out movement.

Off-colour? Mike Nicol's Neo-noir ‘Revenge Trilogy’ and the Post-apartheid Femme Fatale

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines the use of noir, neo-noir and global noir conventions in Mike Nicol's ‘revenge trilogy’ of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who is shown to be an ‘evil’ concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under post-apartheid conditions. The ‘dame’ in question, Shemina February, is portrayed in such a way that she becomes a projection of what scholars and commentators increasingly see as a corrupt, neoliberal power-base hijacking the legacy of the South African struggle against apartheid. However, the article raises the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political ‘evil’ in a black female character? Coming from a white writer, regardless of his credentials, such a gesture raises the possibility of dubious racial and gender typecasting in an act of (perhaps unconscious?) projection. Might the white post-apartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of post-apartheid, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto ‘bad’ women after the Second World War? The article offers alternate readings of Nicol's femme fatale.

THE IMPACTS OF THE BEAUTY MYTH ON THE EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM OF PECOLA IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the destructive impacts of the beauty myth on the existential freedom of Pecola, the young, poor, black female character, in Toni Morrison‘s ―The Bluest Eye.‖ The analysis is done through feminist criticism supported by the concept of the beauty myth and beauty as well as Sartrean concept of existentialism. The result shows that the widely spread beauty myth blocks Pecola‘s existential freedom on the physical, consciousness, or social life level. All these lead to young Pecola‘s ruined existence.

U.S. Television’s “Mean World” for White Women: The Portrayal of Gender and Race on Fictional Crime Dramas

A quantitative content analysis examined gender and racial stereotypes concerning victim and offender status in fictional crime-based dramas from the 2010–2013 seasons of basic cable television programming in the U.S. Coders documented variables for 983 characters across 65 episodes of television. The study predicted male television characters would stand greater chance than female television characters of being perpetrators of violence and crime. Meanwhile, female television characters would stand greater chance than male television characters of being victims of crime and violence. A z-test of proportions supported these hypotheses, except when it came to a comparison of male and female television characters who appeared as victims of violence. A research question addressed the gender (male, female) and racial (Black, White) composition of crime and violence perpetration and victimization. Chi square and z-test analyses confirmed White female television characters stood greater chance of being victims of crime than White male, Black female, and Black male television characters. White female television characters stood the greatest chance of being victims who suffer serious harm or death. White women stood a greater chance of being rape or sexual assault victims, being victims of serious harm at the hands of an assailant, and being attacked by a stranger. Cultivation theory informed the discussion, proposing that persistent exposure to such stereotypical content may nurture skewed perceptions concerning the prevalence of crime targeting women, and especially White women, in the real world.

Rebellious and Strong Black Women in <i>Paradise</i>

The main aim of this paper is to apply black feminist tenets especially those of Bell Hooks and Alice Walker to demonstrate that unlike the passive black female characters of The Bluest Eye, and the resisting but finally victimized black women of Beloved, the wise and strong black women of Paradise who live in the Convent, are strong enough to recreate themselves as subjects, and to cultivate their own unique identity in a hegemonic environment which is replete with racial and gender discrimination. Black feminist actions and womanistic rituals help them accomplish this improvement. Consolata, and Mavis are two of such strong women of the Convent who not only succeed in healing themselves, but also in healing other black women as well. Black feminists claim in order to place black women at the center of stories about the American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency. In Paradise black women are depicted thus, have their own voices, and completely reject the patriarchal ideology.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero”: Agent 355 as an Original Black Female Hero in Y: The Last Man

This article reads the comic-book series Y: The Last Man as a subversive articulation of critical race and feminist discourses despite the guise of Eurocentricity and the pretext of a white male “protagonist.” I argue that the true protagonist of the series is the black female character Agent 355, an unconventional hero who complicates stereotypical representations of race, gender, class, and so on. Despite a post-apocalyptic setting where the male species is largely extinct, 355 (rather than the sole human male survivor) is also the narrative’s driving force and the most powerful, albeit unattainable, object of desire.

Sacred Ways of Meaning and Knowing: A Comparative Reading of Caribbean Literature

Sacred Ways of Meaning and Knowing:A Comparative Reading of Caribbean Literature Matthew Pettway (bio) CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial. By Raphael Dalleo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2011. OSHUN’S DAUGHTERS: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas. By Vanessa K. Valdés. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2014. This essay is a comparative reading of Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (2011) by Raphael Dalleo and Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) by Vanessa Valdés. Raphael Dalleo’s book is a pan-Caribbean literary history examining the role of the public intellectual from the plantation colony to the emergence of postcolonial regimes. Though also concerned with Caribbean literature, Valdés’s woman-centered approach engages Afro-diasporan religion not as an intellectual project but an intimately sacred means of knowing and healing in the lives of black female characters across the Western Hemisphere. Her emphasis on Caribbean, [End Page 115] U.S., and Brazilian women writers, female protagonists, and female-identified African divine entities, situates her scholarship in the vein of renowned critic Miriam DeCosta-Willis and qualifies her book as an interruption of an otherwise androcentric paradigm. By way of juxtapositional analysis, I explore the multiple contributions of Valdés and Dalleo’s books in order to compare disparate methodologies and to make critical suggestions for future research. Owing to my interests, my critique is centered on Hispanophone Caribbean authors, the recovery of Afro-Caribbean colonial literature, Spanish-speaking Caribbean writers, and a critical approach to African diasporic religion as epistemological practice. I argue that future literary histories should further integrate black colonial literati into Dalleo’s notion of a nineteenth century Caribbean counterpublic, thus expanding an otherwise constricted notion of discursive practice. In that respect, there is much research to be done. Moreover, I believe the silence Dalleo assigns to Afro-diasporic religion inadvertently negates the epistemological significance of such traditions. In this essay, I recommend constructive approaches for the revision of the literary record and my reading of Vanessa Valdés’ work submits certain methodological considerations. Instead of speaking in terms of zeitgeist, Dalleo names three periods in Caribbean literary history: plantation slavery, modern colonialism, and post-coloniality. Dalleo reworks Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of “literature as a field” in order to examine “the mediating autonomy of cultural producers” (6). Though his primary concern is the writing of a pan-Caribbean literary history, Dalleo engages cultural studies as an instrument for contextualizing literature in terms of social structures and institutional power. The author explores how colonialism persists in the Caribbean not in a static way but as the reemergence of domination to contain resistance movements. Dalleo’s critical scope is impressive, embracing the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean from the nineteenth century through the twentieth and into the present. Dalleo says that Caribbean writers were unable to forge a Caribbean public sphere grounded in local practices until the second half of the nineteenth century when it slowly began to take form (15–16, 44). Plantation Societies and the Rise of a Caribbean Counterpublic Rafael Dalleo argues that the nineteenth-century Caribbean was not a public sphere as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, but rather constituted a counterpublic where abolitionist literature—largely published in Europe—represented enslaved populations. Habermas envisions a “utopian version of the public sphere” as an emporium of ideas that democratizes discourse by allowing for exchange across class divides (40). But, Dalleo says that newspapers in Caribbean slave societies were the rhetorical vehicle of a small slave-holding elite that feared widespread literacy would give enslaved men and women access to radical abolitionist ideas. The Caribbean press was established in the eighteenth century with two objectives: [End Page 116] keeping records of the monetary value assigned to human captives and as a means of regulating the movement of enslaved persons (25, 30). Dalleo evokes Ángel Rama’s notion of the lettered republic in order to highlight the hierarchical nature of public discourse in Caribbean colonies based on monoculture and captive labor (27). The Uruguayan theorist argued that the Catholic Church and the...

Cleaning up the “dirt”: a study of Maggie Gee’s My Cleaner

Maggie Gee’s 2005 novel, My Cleaner, is critical of international divisions of domestic labor in the neocolonial world, which reproduce global hierarchies of class, gender and race within middle-class households of “developed” countries. Not only does Gee critically explore domestic service in today’s London from a global perspective, but she also makes use of the relationship between Mary Tendo (an immigrant servant woman from Uganda, one of Britain’s former colonies) and her white, middle-class English employer, Vanessa Henman, to explore the tensions, contestations and renegotiations performed in contemporary narrations of English identity. However, Mary’s smooth relationship with the English language, as well as with her national identity, signals the lack of a postcolonial approach in the novel to hierarchies played out in these sites. The aim of this article is to explore such ambivalences in the portrayal of a black female character in Gee’s My Cleaner.

Disney's Tia Dalma: A Critical Interrogation of an "Imagineered" Priestess

The conjure woman has long lived as a popular American cultural icon, so much so that it seemed destined that multimedia conglomerate the Walt Disney Company would eventually adopt and embrace her. The conjure woman’s likeness is reflected in the Disney feature films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). This essay investigates just what happens to black women and spirit work when placed in the hands of Disney, a corporation with a sordid history of pirating in another context. The work is particularly invested in complicating black female body politics by addressing the additional stigma against female spiritual autonomy. How is an association with African spiritual cosmologies inscribed on the physicality of black women in popular culture? I focus my attention on Tia Dalma, the minor black female character engaged in Vodou in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, applying a close reading of the spiritual iconography and other cinematic coding surrounding her performance of African-based spirituality. I assess Disney’s appropriation of black cultural forms in the construction of fantasy and fairytale.

Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy

Racially exploited, sexually violated, and often emotionally humiliated for years or decades, certain black female characters within four of Toni Morrison’s novels make violent choices that are not always easily understandable. The violence—sometimes verbal, but more frequently physical—is often an attempt to create unique solutions to avoid further victimization. Thus, violence itself becomes an act of rebellion, a form of resistance to oppressive power. The choice of violence—often rendered upon those within their own community and family—redirects powerlessness and transforms these characters, re-defining them as compellingly dominant women. However, their transformation often has multidimensional repercussions for them and those with whom they have chosen to be violent.

‘Death never used to be for the young’: Grieving Teenage Murder in debbie tucker green's random

debbie tucker green is the most high-profile Black British woman playwright of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with productions of her plays seen at mainstream London venues including Hampstead Theatre, Royal Court, Soho Theatre and Young Vic. Her innovative voice moves away from the explicit concerns with identity and diaspora of predecessors from the 1980s and 1990s, to address issues of global significance in the world today. These include poverty, child soldiers and the Aids crisis in Africa, female sex tourism, domestic violence, sexual abuse and incest. This article explores how random (Royal Court, 2008) stages a poignant response to the epidemic of teenage knife murders in London in 2007 and 2008. Using analysis of the text, the production and theatre critics’ reactions, I demonstrate how tucker green's focus on the grief of a family affected by the murder of a child provides a unique perspective distinct from representations of similar themes in plays by Black British male playwrights. random is narrated primarily through the perspectives of the black female characters, epitomising tucker green's tendency to place (black) women at the centre of plays that deal with urgent themes in the contemporary world. I argue that, whilst women's perspectives are paramount, the narratives also incorporate strategies that imply a broad collective social responsibility for eradicating violence and abuse, and show how her unique writing style foregrounds her successful presence in mainstream contemporary British theatre.