Re-Imagining Black Women

A Critique of Post-Feminist and Post-Racial Melodrama in Culture and Politics

Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781479850891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479824380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Social Sciences

WINNER OF THE W.E.B. DUBOIS DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD, GIVEN BY THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK POLITICAL SCIENTISTS

A wide-ranging Black feminist interrogation, reaching from the #MeToo movement to the legacy of gender-based violence against Black women
From Michelle Obama to Condoleezza Rice, Black women are uniquely scrutinized in the public eye. In Re-Imagining Black Women, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd explores how Black women—and Blackness more broadly—are understood in our political imagination and often become the subjects of public controversy.
Drawing on politics, popular culture, psychoanalysis, and more, Alexander-Floyd examines our conflicting ideas, opinions, and narratives about Black women, showing how they are equally revered and reviled as an embodiment of good and evil, cast either as victims or villains, citizens or outsiders.
Ultimately, Alexander-Floyd showcases the complex experiences of Black women as political subjects. At a time of extreme racial tension, Re-Imagining Black Women provides insight into the parts that Black women play, and are expected to play, in politics and popular culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Introduction: Melodrama, Liminality, and Post-Politics: Neoliberal Racial and Gender Formation in the New Millennium
• 1. Splitting Condi(licious): Condoleezza Rice and Melodramas of “Closeness” in US National Community Formation
• 2. Unpacking President Barack Obama’s “Improbable Story”: A Case Study of Gender, Race, Class, and Melodrama in Electoral Politics
• 3. Diary of a Mad Black (Wo)Man: Tyler Perry, Wounded Masculinity, and Post-Feminist, Post-Racial Melodrama
• 4. The Reality of the White Male Rapist: Black Women’s Rape, Melodrama, and US-Based American Political Development
• 5. MeToo? Black Women, Melodrama, and Sexual Harassment
• Conclusion: Turbulent Futures: Post-Politics as an Analytic
• Coda: Post-Politics in the Era of COVID-19
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author