Imagining the Black Female Body

Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture

C. Henderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780230107052
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230115477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This volume explores issues of black female identity through the various "imaginings" of the black female body in print and visual culture.  Contributions emphasize the ways in which the black female body is framed and how black women (and their allies) have sought to write themselves back into social discourses on their terms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Public Property: On Black Women, Bodies, and First Lady Michelle Obama
• 1 Racing Sex—Sexing Race: The Invention of the Black Feminine Body
• 2 Disembodiments: Ellen Gallagher’s Watery M etamorphoses
• 3 Stigmata: Embodying the Scars of Slavery
• 4 “Pull Up to the Bumper”: Fashion and Queerness in Grace Jones’s One Man Show
• 5 Images That Sell: The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Ads
• 6 Four Women, For Women: Black Women—All Grown Up
• 7 The Lower Stratum of History: The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker
• 8 Navel-Erasing: Androgyny and Self-Making in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
• 9 “If Rigor Is Our Dream”: The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
• Afterword: “You . . . You Remind Me of . . .”: A Black Feminist’s Rejection of the White Imagination
• Contributors
• Index