Description
Book SynopsisRecovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.
Trade ReviewAlthough feminists have studied the social construction of the female body for many decades, few have focused on black women. In Recovering the Black Female Body, the editors present a pioneering collection of original writings by academics and artists on æhow African-American women, from slavery to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of the dominant culture.Æ. * Publishers Weekly *
A collection of essays that examine the complex workings of race, gender and the body. Editors Bennett and Dickerson explain that it seeks to æamplifyÆ African American women writersÆ attempts to ætake back their selves and reappropriate and reconstitute a body that has often been hyperoticized or exoticized and made a site of impropriety and crime.Æ. * WomenÆs Review of Books *
By examining African American women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book not only makes a significant contribution to a body of scholarly work but also attempts to ærecoverÆ a more accurate representation of the African American female body. * DePauw Magazine *
A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings. The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity. -- Claudia Tate * Princeton University *
Table of ContentsFrances Ellen Watkins sings the body electric / Michael Bennett
"The deeds done in my body": black feminist theory, performance, and the truth about Adah Isaacs Menken / Daphne A. Brooks
The flower of Black female sexuality in Pauline Hopkins's Winona / Dorri Rabung Beam
Shopping to pass, passing to shop: bodily self-fashioning in the fiction of Nella Larsen / Meredith Goldsmith
Re-locating the Black female subject: the landscape of the body in the poems of Lucille Clifton / Ajuan Maria Mance
Body language: the Black female body and the word in Suzan-Lori Park's The death of the last Black man in the whole entire world / Yvette Louis
Detecting bodies: Barbara Neely's domestic sleuth and the trope of the (in)visible woman / Doris Witt
Summoning somebody: the flesh made word in Toni Morrison's fiction / Vanessa D. Dickerson
On being a fat black girl in a fat-hating culture / Margaret K. Bass
Body and soul: identifying (with) the Black lesbian body in Cheryl Dunye's Watermelon woman / Mark Winokur
Pumping iron with resistance: Carla Dunlap's Victorious body / Jacqueline E. Brady
Wearing your race wrong: hair, drama, and a politics of representation for African American women at play on a battlefield / Noliwe Rooks (photographs by Bill Gaskins)
Afterword: recovery missions: imaging the body ideals / Deborah E. McDowell
