Description
Book SynopsisAssertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya exposes the power and reach of this myth in advertising, films, and literature about the South, and in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
Trade ReviewFew American icons have been as comforting or as destructive as the black mammy. If lynching was the brutal face of white supremacy, Aunt Jemima and her ilk were the face of the white fantasy of harmonious race relations. With exceptional scholarly craft, McElya reveals the distortions, hardships, and tragedy that the smiling face and jovial demeanor of the mythic black mammy were intended to obscure. This book signals the arrival of a talented new historian. -- W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and MemoryAmericans loved Aunt Jemima and their mammies. There is no more powerful and damaging popular symbol in American culture than the faithful slave in all its manifestations. McElya's sensitive, surprising, and enlightening book will make readers wonder at how desperate white America was to believe that slaves were loyal and content. This book is painfully marvelous scholarship that should reach a broad readership. -- David Blight, author of
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American MemoryMcElya's powerful blend of cultural and political history illuminates the ways twentieth-century white Southerners tried to maintain their historic privilege while denying the violence of their past. Following the trajectory from Aunt Jemima to Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen,"
Clinging to Mammy traces white Americans' efforts to define, coerce and reap the benefits of African American women's labor while maintaining a firm grip on political power. -- Jane Dailey, author of
Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation VirginiaMcElya shows vividly how "mammy" serves as a perfect archetype for analyzing cultural politics of race and gender, and how they changed. She gives us parlor theatrics, courtroom drama, legislative debate, and movement politics. This is a wonderfully expansive book. -- Scott A Sandage, author of
Born Losers: A History of Failure in AmericaDetails the tenacious hold of the “mammy” myth of contented colored folk on white public imagination. * Multidiversity: Myers Book Commentary *
If you want to understand the ways that white women exploited black women’s domestic labor and how Hollywood and Madison Avenue went on to make billions marketing that exploitation, this is the text to read. McElya’s book clarifies why we should not expect simple or enduring political alliances based on gender unless and until we have some very serious, difficult, and sustained conversations around class and race. -- Melissa Harris-Perry * Elle *
