Images Of Black Women Research Articles

Archive Spotlight: The Image of Black Women in Film Advertising as Seen in the BFC/A's Hatch-Billops Collection

Archive Spotlight: The Image of Black Women in Film Advertising as Seen in the BFC/A's Hatch-Billops Collection

Teaching Analysis and Agency Using Racist and Sexist Imagery: Implications for Cultural Studies in the College Classroom

Black Women in America is an upper-division elective course for students majoring in African American or women’s studies at California State University Fullerton (CSUF). Students can also take the course for general education credit (GEC) to fulfill the disciplinary learning requirement in the social sciences category. I have taught this course at CSUF at least once a year since 2002 and have changed the course readings, lectures, and assignments on a regular basis. In April 2007, however, when American radio personality Don Imus created a national controversy by referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team, whose players were predominantly Black, as a group of “nappy-headed hos,” I was provoked to completely overhaul my approach to teaching this course. It was clear that my students did not fully understand the complicated cultural issues raised by Imus’s comments. This article describes how I incorporated visual images of Black women in media and culture to help my students challenge narrow, false, and distorted depictions of Black women’s daily lives. It further explains my intellectual rationale for the particular course goals, objectives, and pedagogical tools I took up using a three-pronged approach to cultural studies analysis. Finally, this article showcases some of my students’ work, which demonstrates how students can use their analytical skills to promote Black women’s agency.

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)

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...

Richard Wright's Native Son (review)

Reviewed by: Richard Wright's Native Son E. Lâle Demirtürk Ana María Fraile , ed. Richard Wright's Native Son. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 260 pp. $73.00. There has been a growing number of edited collections on Richard Wright scholarship in recent decades. Yoshinobu Hakutani's Critical Essays on Richard Wright (1982), Keneth Kinnamon's New Essays on Native Son (1990), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah's Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), Arnold Rampersad's Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1994), and Robert J. Butler's The Critical Response to Richard Wright (1995), to mention a few, have made significant contributions to our understanding of Wright's works. Richard Wright's Native Son emerges as one such book, which engages a real dialogue not only between the articles in the book and the readers, but between the articles which seem to speak back to each other in an animated set of discussions about Native Son (1940). This seems to fit into the Dialogue Series Editor Michael J. Meyer's aim to bring together established and new voices in the academic community. All of the articles in the collection, written by eleven contributors from a wide range of universities in the United States and Spain, have appeared in the volume for the first time. The collection comprises five parts, each focusing on different aspects of Native Son. In the first part, Caleb Corkery's and Philip Goldstein's articles interpret the reception of the novel under a new light. On the one hand, Corkery [End Page 521] argues that Wright's image in the mind of American readers in 1940 explains the great impact of the novel on American culture, because the book enabled Wright to connect especially with liberal white American readers through a commonly held commitment to liberal ideologies. On the other, Goldstein's article contends how the radical politics of Max does not coincide with Bigger's sense of liberation, for this is closely related to Wright's transformation from a communist to a Black Power supporter as well as to the emergence of black studies and the fading influences of naturalism and modernism with changing times. In the second part, "Gendered Textualities," articles by Yvonne Robinson Jones and Carol E. Henderson highlight different views on Wright's representation of gender. Jones claims that Wright's sexism can be detected clearly in the novel, representing stereotyped black and white female characters, as he, in turn, stereotypes white males as potential racists, while also creating emasculated African American male characters, who use their agency to transcend their oppressive status. Henderson, on the other hand, focuses on the global implications of the representations of black women in the novel, which she argues paved the way for African American women writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry to revise Wright's images of black women, and hence search for new ways of representing black female subjectivity in the urban setting. In the third part, "Spatial Dynamics," Babacar M'Baye and Herman Beavers deal with the local and global spaces implicated in the novel. M'Baye places the novel alongside Wright's Black Power and The Color Curtain, locating all of them in international contexts, as these texts constitute a forceful critique of oppression in both the United States and the third world. According to M'Baye, Wright deconstructs the consequences of Western oppression on formerly colonized peoples in the United States and Africa. M'Baye also argues that Max's discourse stands for Wright's interpretation of how the social and cultural institutions embody the foundational ideology of slavery in the modern world. Beavers, on the other hand, claims that Wright embraced Edgar Allan Poe's use of vertical symbolism in his short fiction in the process of conceptualizing Bigger Thomas. Beavers focuses on Bigger as a figuration of surplus meaning, as he interprets the novel as a work that reveals thermodynamic principles. The fourth part, "A Polyphony of Genres," includes articles by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Heather Duerre Humann, and Carme Manuel, who discuss how different genres take new shapes in the novel. Fraile...

The depiction of black women in popular songs and some poems on AIDS in post-independence Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The most serious health concern in Zimbabwe today is the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS. Since 1987, the state radio stations, television channels, public and private print media have been at the forefront, giving information about the AIDS pandemic to the people. But as Danlabi Musa observes, ‘diversity’ and bigger audience are not the function of channel multiplicity’ but have also to do with “…access and programming” (Musa, in Gecau et al. 1996:23). This chapter looks at how the prevalence of AIDS in Zimbabwe is influencing the construction of the identity of black women in Zimbabwe, as is revealed in the popular songs and some oral poems. Unlike television, which only the rich have, access to newspapers, messages which depend on the taught skill of reading, songs, oral poems can be more open and democratic forms. Both are oral and aural and can break the boundaries imposed by writing or reading. Anybody can appropriate them for different purposes. Although male or female singers in Zimbabwe have been singing about the plight of women as minors in private and public circles, negative images of black women continue to be produced, circulated and consumed through song and some oral poetry. This chapter argues that the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe has produced a new moral discourse in which women are objectified as “dangerous” and “loose” on the one hand, and are expected to become “respectable” and “disciplined” to attain the newly projected status of a “proper” women on the other.

Teaching Ar'n't I a Woman?

Teaching Ar'n't I a Woman? Daina Ramey Berry (bio) Each spring semester, I begin my African American women's history class with images of black women from the seventeenth century to the present.1 Students squirm in their seats because the first few slides depict enslaved women in coffles being transported to slave ships. Images of half-naked bondwomen, with agonizing facial expressions, exposed breasts, and children clinging to their ankles, shock the students. Some cringe when the next slide appears. Pictured is an enslaved woman forced to her knees, her arms twisted behind her, while two men stamp a hot iron rod on her shoulder to brand the initials of a slave-trading firm or slaveholder. Moving forward to the twentieth century, students seem relieved to see the familiar image of Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind.2 No more naked bodies, they think; no more distressing photographs. Yet this stereotype is in some ways equally disturbing. I begin this course the same way Deborah Gray White opened Ar'n't I a Woman?—by debunking the myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions of enslaved women as the promiscuous Jezebel, the angry Sapphire, or the loyal Mammy. "In antebellum America," White explained, "the female slave's chattel status, sex, and race combined to create a complicated set of myths about black womanhood": one "carnal, the other maternal."3 I have been amazed by the way students seem comfortable with the Mammy stereotype. "Jezebel," on the other hand, is more difficult for them to discern because it means that they have to consider the sexual exploitation of enslaved women, which makes many students uncomfortable. The Sapphire stereotype, at least for most students, is represented by the domineering black woman they saw in such 1970s television characters as Esther from Sanford and Son or Florence from The Jeffersons. Reflecting on her work in the 1999 revised edition, White noted that "there is now more history than myth" when it comes to our understanding of enslaved women.4 For two decades, scholars have used Ar'n't I a Woman? in survey and seminar courses, enabling students to think about the institution of slavery from a female perspective. In addition to how I have used the book in the classroom, this essay also discusses some of the reasons it remains the premier book adopted in history and African American, women, and gender studies courses at institutions of higher learning. Ar'n't I a Woman? is an instructive tool that I have used and relied on to teach the history of slavery from a gendered perspective. [End Page 139] The first time I assigned this book was in an undergraduate survey course on African American history. I opened the class with the following questions: What was the role of women in West African communities, during the transatlantic slave trade, on board the slavers crossing the Atlantic, and in colonial and antebellum America? Students were stumped because they had not considered that women's experiences differed from men's. They had not considered how a lactating mother had to take care of an infant during the middle passage; how a woman who had recently given birth had to labor in the tobacco, cotton, and rice fields of Virginia, Georgia, or South Carolina; or how women and men employed different resistance strategies. They came to class with the assumption that the enslaved experience was universal. Soon, however, White's scholarship pushed them to consider the lives of enslaved females. Students read Ar'n't I a Woman? in conjunction with Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In their midterm papers, they discussed the ways in which women and men experienced slavery based on these three readings. Many of them argued, as Harriet Jacobs poignantly expressed in her narrative, that "slavery was terrible for men, but far more terrible for women."5 They analyzed legal cases on Lexis-Nexis that involved bondwomen. Some wrote about the methods enslaved women used to cope with slavery.6 Some organized their essays around the life cycle of female slavery as White...

Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas

A unique and important study, Stepping Forward examines the experiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black women in Africa and African diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives in a number of different settings. This wide-ranging collection designed for classroom use explores the broad themes that have shaped black women's goals, options, and responses: religion, education, political activism, migration, and cultural transformation. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine the lives of black women in the United States and the Caribbean Basin; in the white settler societies of Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa; and in the black settler societies of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Among the contributors to this volume are historians, political scientists, and scholars of literature, music, and law. What emerges from their work is an image of black women's agency, self-reliance, and resiliency. Despite cultural differences and geographical variations, black women have provided foundations on which black communities have not only survived, but also thrived. Stepping Forward is a valuable addition to our understanding of women's roles in these diverse communities.

Beauty Matters, and: Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness, and: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (review)

Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, & Black Women's Consciousness by Ingrid Banks. New York: New York University Press, 2000, 197 pp., $55.00 hardcover.

Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen by Lisa M. Anderson (review)

Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen by Lisa M. Anderson (review)

Re‐Creational Television: The Paradox of Change and Continuity within Stereotypical Iconography

Speculation abounds regarding the cumulative effect of stereotypical images in the media, especially those effects directed toward ethnic/gender identity. Using images of Black women in the United States as a case study, this paper explores the ways in which three historical stereotypes—Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire—are re‐created in current‐day television broadcasts. I argue that these recreations influence modern depictions of Black women in important ways. But my analysis differs from other sociological works on stereotypes, as it critically examines three underexplored components of the stereotyping process: (1) the symbolic properties of stereotypical images; (2) the separation of time and space achieved on television; and (3) the use of rigid interpretive frames as means of sustaining stereotypes in this media age.[b]lack women, still least powerful economically, socially and politically in American society … have been refracted through a prism that tends to project them in one of three extremes: larger than life as matriarchs or sex objects, diminished to insignificance as mammies or maids, or faded into invisibility as irrelevant. (Edwards 1993, p. 217)

Close‐up and slow motion in Julie Dash's daughters of the dust

Black feminist independent filmmaker Julie Dash responds to mainstream cinema's marginalization of women of color with her film Daughters of the Dust (1991). Using the ideology of the visible to her advantage, Dash transforms cinematic conventions of slow motion and close‐up into vehicles for audience gaze and “Black looks,”; privileging the image of Black women. Through her use of nonlinear narrative devices and mythic images, Dash undermines the conventions of realist text.

The Emergence of Black Women's History

Book Reviews The Emergence of Black Women's History Jacqueline Anne Rouse. Eugenia Burns Hope, Black Southern Reformer. Athens , Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1989. xi +182 pp. ISBN 0-8203-1082-4 (d); 0-8203-1464-1 (pb). K. Sue Jewel. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy. London: Routledge, 1993. xii + 238 pp. ISBN 0-415-08777-5 (cl); 0-415-04253-4 (pb). Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Bapttet Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. xü + 306 pp. ISBN 0-674-76977-5 (cl). Cynthia Neverdon-Morton. Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925. KnoxviUe, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989.272 pp. ISBN 0-87049-583-6 (d); 0-87049684 -0 (pb). Susan Lynn. Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992. xi + 218 pp. ISBN 0-8135-1867-9 (cl); 0-81351868 -7 (pb). Fon Louise Gordon The studies under review here examine either the work experiences of black women or the images of black women in American society. HistoricaUy, the majority of working black women in American society have been confined to agricultural labor and domestic service or "black women's work," defined as low-paid and menial.1 However, the black women chronicled and profiled in these studies are from the middle and upper dasses, and consequently represent the minority of black women. Their activities remained "black women's work" in that they were striving for the improvement and upfift of their communities and the race. These studies reveal that black women have not constituted a monoUthic group; their very diverse Uves, interests, and activities have been dependent on many fadors. These works all help to expand our definition and understanding of black women's work. K. Sue JeweU's From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond focuses on a concern that has historically been very important to black women: protecting themselves from the negative imagery of blacks in American sodety that arises from the racial caste system. It is a study of the images and © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 128 Journal of Women's History Fall ideology of black women that are produced by the mass media and designed to maintain their position as the lowest members of the sodal hierardhy. JeweU attempts to determine the factors responsible for the sodal, poUtical, economic, legal, and educational debasement of black women. She explains that to focus on poverty, unemployment, Ulegitimacy , and other social problems begs the question. National social poUcies designed to remedy these problems have raised expectations but are ineffedive. But more importantly, the faüure of social policies to elevate black women and the black community is used by whites to advance the notion that blacks are incapable of elevation even with federaUy funded sodal assistance. This anti-black assessment of black women is encouraged by the members of power elites who have established a correlation between group elevation and equal access and encouraged a belief in meritocracy. But Jewell argues that the equal access produced by the QvU Rights Movement aided only the black middle class and not the vast underclass; and that no meritocracy exists because American society is based on ascribed, not achieved, qualities. The power dite has established artifidal constructs and conditions to create dissension among the masses. Among these is a hierarchy based on race, gender, and class. Headed by elite white males, this hierarchy includes class-stratified white males, color-stratified males of color, white women (who share the same race as white males), and color-stratified females of color. Access to the benefits and rewards of society depend on rank in a scale on which black women occupy the lowest status (pp. 1-5). To insure its continued monopoly of the majority of society's resources, the power elite controls not only the means of material production but the production of ideas as wdl. The mass media are used by the power eUte to...

Images of black women among anglo college students

Previous research on popular images of women and of minority groups has looked almost solely at images of minority men and of white women. This article presents survey data on images of black women among 256 white non-Hispanic college undergraduates, using a modified Katz/Braly scale. The article explores the nature, distribution, correlates, and emotional evaluations of these images and the implications of these images for black women's lives. Images of black women differed substantially from those of American women in general. Most commonly, black women were characterized as loud, talkative, aggressive, intelligent, straightforward, and argumentative. In addition, students rated positive traits less positive and negative traits less negative when exhibited by black women than by American women in general, apparently because of their expectations for black women's behavior.

The Image of Black Women in 20th Century South American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology

The Image of Black Women in 20th Century South American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology