Black Women in America

Black Women in America

Author: Kim Marie Vaz

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1994-11-02

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0803954557

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Black women have an image of themselves that differs from those others impose. Collectively, the contributors to this anthology demonstrate that such socially constructed images hide the complexities and ambiguities, the challenges, and the joys experienced in the real lives of black women.


Representations of Black Women in the Media

Representations of Black Women in the Media

Author: Marquita Marie Gammage

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-16

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1317370481

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In 1920 W.E.B. Du Bois cited the damnation of women as linked to the devaluation of motherhood. This dilemma, he argues, had a crushing blow on Black women as they were forced into slavery. Black womanhood, portrayed as hypersexual by nature, became an enduring stereotype which did not coincide with the dignity of mother and wife. This portrayal continues to reinforce negative stereotypes of Black women in the media today. This book highlights how Black women have been negatively portrayed in the media, focusing on the export nature of media and its ability to convey notions of Blackness to the public. It argues that media such as rap music videos, television dramas, reality television shows, and newscasts create and affect expectations of Black women. Exploring the role that racism, misogyny and media play in the representation of Black womanhood, it provides a foundation for challenging contemporary media’s portrayal of Black women.


The Coupling Convention : Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

The Coupling Convention : Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

Author: Ann duCille Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Wesleyan University

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1993-10-19

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0195359119

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What does the tradition of marriage mean for people who have historically been deprived of its legal status? Generally thought of as a convention of the white middle class, the marriage plot has received little attention from critics of African-American literature. In this study, Ann duCille uses texts such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to demonstrate that the African-American novel, like its European and Anglo-American counterparts, has developed around the marriage plot--what she calls "the coupling convention." Exploring the relationship between racial ideology and literary and social conventions, duCille uses the coupling convention to trace the historical development of the African-American women's novel. She demonstrates the ways in which black women appropriated this novelistic device as a means of expressing and reclaiming their own identity. More than just a study of the marriage tradition in black women's fiction, however, The Coupling Convention takes up and takes on many different meanings of tradition. It challenges the notion of a single black literary tradition, or of a single black feminist literary canon grounded in specifically black female language and experience, as it explores the ways in which white and black, male and female, mainstream and marginalized "traditions" and canons have influenced and cross-fertilized each other. Much more than a period study, The Coupling Convention spans the period from 1853 to 1948, addressing the vital questions of gender, subjectivity, race, and the canon that inform literary study today. In this original work, duCille offers a new paradigm for reading black women's fiction.


Black Women's Liberation Movement Music

Black Women's Liberation Movement Music

Author: Reiland Rabaka

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-30

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1000966798

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Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music argues that the Black Women’s Liberation Movement of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s was a unique combination of Black political feminism, Black literary feminism, and Black musical feminism, among other forms of Black feminism. This book critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political, and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement, and Sexual Revolution. The soul, funk, and disco music of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement era is simultaneously interpreted as universalist, feminist (in a general sense), and Black female-focused. This music’s incredible ability to be interpreted in so many different ways speaks to the importance and power of Black women’s music and the fact that it has multiple meanings for a multitude of people. Within the worlds of both Black Popular Movement Studies and Black Popular Music Studies there has been a long-standing tendency to almost exclusively associate Black women’s music of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s with the Black male-dominated Black Power Movement or the White female-dominated Women’s Liberation Movement. However, this book reveals that much of the soul, funk, and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement. Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, and Sexuality Studies.


Black Women's Yoga History

Black Women's Yoga History

Author: Stephanie Y. Evans

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 1438483651

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How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.


The Radical Imagination of Black Women

The Radical Imagination of Black Women

Author: Pearl K. Ford Dowe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0197650791

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"The Radical Imagination of Black Women: Ambition, Politics and Power explores how elite Black women decide to seek political office. Despite their marginalized existence Black women engage in a robust political participation that includes seeking elected office. Utilizing interviews of Black women who currently or have served in office and focus group data of Black women, the manuscript bridges the literatures of ambition theory and marginalization through a theory I refer to a "ambition on the margins". Black women's resistance to marginalization informs us about the conditions that shape Black women and their political socialization, while ambition theory helps us understand what they do in response to marginalization. The socialization process fosters the decision-making process of Black women. This framework moves the extant literature beyond the premise that the political ambition of Black women is less than White women or men. Political science's approach to ambition negates and disregards mechanisms beyond voting that Black women often engage in such as doing political work through community and civic organizations. That data provided from interviews reveal the complex dynamics that contribute to the nuanced process that Black women emerge as candidates and engage as politicians"--


Black Women’s Christian Activism

Black Women’s Christian Activism

Author: Betty Livingston Adams

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1479814814

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2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award Recipient Winner of the 2018 Author's Award in scholarly non-fiction, presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Winner, 2020 Kornitzer Book Prize, given by Drew University Examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just barely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of “the suburbs” depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. Johnson’s story is powerful, but she was just one among the many working-class activists integral to the budding days of the civil rights movement. Focusing on the strategies and organizational models church women employed in the fight for social justice, Adams tracks the intersections of politics and religion, race and gender, and place and space in a New York City suburb, a local example that offers new insights on northern racial oppression and civil rights protest. As this book makes clear, religion made a key difference in the lives and activism of ordinary black women who lived, worked, and worshiped on the margin during this tumultuous time.


How Long? How Long? : African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights

How Long? How Long? : African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights

Author: Davis Belinda Robnett Assistant Professor of Sociology University of California

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1997-06-25

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0198027443

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A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long? How Long? presents both a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have egregiously neglected the most important leaders of the Civil Rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women. Author Belinda Robnett argues that the diversity of experiences of the African-American women organizers has been underemphasized in favor of monolithic treatments of their femaleness and blackness. Drawing heavily on interviews with actual participants in the American Civil Rights movement, this work retells the movement as seen through the eyes and spoken through the voices of African-American women participants. It is the first book to provide an analysis of race, class, gender, and culture as substructures that shaped the organization and outcome of the movement. Robnett examines the differences among women participants in the movement and offers the first cohesive analysis of the gendered relations and interactions among its black activists, thus demonstrating that femaleness and blackness cannot be viewed as sufficient signifiers for movement experience and individual identity. Finally, this book makes a significant contribution to social movement theory by providing a crucial understanding of the continuity and complexity of social movements, clarifying the need for different layers of leadership that come to satisfy different movement needs. An engaging narrative history as well as a major contribution to social movement and feminist theory, How Long? How Long? will appeal to students and scholars of social activism, women's studies, American history, and African-American studies, and to general readers interested in the perennially fascinating story of the American Civil Rights movement.


Resistance and Empowerment in Black Women's Hair Styling

Resistance and Empowerment in Black Women's Hair Styling

Author: Dr Elizabeth Johnson

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-28

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1409472876

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Elizabeth Johnson's Resistance and Empowerment in Black Women's Hair Styling develops the argument that one way Black women define themselves and each other, is by the way they style/groom their hair via endorsement by the media through advertisement, idealized identification of Black female celebrities, and encouragement by professional celebrity hair stylists who serve as change agents. As a result, hair becomes a physical manifestation of their self-identity, revealing a private and personal mindset. Her research answers the following questions: What is the relationship between Black females' choice of hairstyles/grooming and transmitted messages of aesthetics by the dominant culture through culturally specific magazines?; What role do the natural hair blogs/vlogs play as a change agent in encouraging or discouraging consumers grooming their hair in its natural state?; What impact does a globalized consumer market of Black hair care products have on Hispanic/Latinas and Bi-Racial women?; Are Black female Generation Y members more likely to receive backlash for failure to conform their hair to dominant standards in their hair adornment in the workplace? Johnson thus demonstrates that the major concern from messages sent to Black women about their hair is its impact on Black identity. Thus, the goal of Black women should be to break with hegemonic modes of seeing, thinking, and being for full liberation. This critical and deep consciousness will debunk the messages told to Black women that their kinky, frizzy, thick hair is undesirable, bad, unmanageable, and shackling.