Additional information
by Michael Bennett (Contribution by), Vanessa D. Dickerson (Contribution by), Daphne Brooks (Contribution by)
Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating the interrelated issues of race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women's depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted either to hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime.
The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to "recover" the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self.
The pieces in this book--all of them published here for the first time--address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors, and twentieth-century pulp fiction.
Recovering 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.
Contributors are Margaret Bass, Dorri Rabung Beam, Michael Bennett, Jacqueline E. Brady, Daphne A. Brooks, Vanessa D. Dickerson, Meredith Goldsmith, Yvette Louis, Ajuan Maria Mance, Noliwe Rooks, Mark Winokur, and Doris Witt. This book also contains a foreword by Carla L. Peterson and an afterword by Deborah E. McDowell.
Author Biography
About the Author
Bennett is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.
Michael Bennett, M.D., educated at both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, is a board-certified psychiatrist, Canadian, and Red Sox fan. He has a private practice which he's been running for almost thirty years. Michael lives with his wife in Boston. Daphne Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. Dorri Beam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. MEREDITH GOLDSMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington. Winokur teaches film, popular culture, and American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins s Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.
