African Americans and the Culture of Pain (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture) [Hardcover]

Debra Walker King (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cultural Frames, Framing Culture | Publication Date: February 26, 2008

In this compelling new study, Debra Walker King considers fragments of experience recorded in oral histories and newspapers as well as those produced in twentieth-century novels, films, and television that reveal how the black body in pain functions as a rhetorical device and as political strategy. King's primary hypothesis is that, in the United States, black experience of the body in pain is as much a construction of social, ethical, and economic politics as it is a physiological phenomenon.

As an essential element defining black experience in America, pain plays many roles. It is used to promote racial stereotypes, increase the sale of movies and other pop culture products, and encourage advocacy for various social causes. Pain is employed as a tool of resistance against racism, but it also functions as a sign of racism's insidious ability to exert power over and maintain control of those it claims--regardless of race. With these dichotomous uses of pain in mind, King considers and questions the effects of the manipulation of an unspoken but long-standing belief that pain, suffering, and the hope for freedom and communal subsistence will merge to uplift those who are oppressed, especially during periods of social and political upheaval. This belief has become a ritualized philosophy fueling the multiple constructions of black bodies in pain, a belief that has even come to function as an identity and community stabilizer.

In her attempt to interpret the constant manipulation and abuse of this philosophy, King explores the redemptive and visionary power of pain as perceived historically in black culture, the aesthetic value of black pain as presented in a variety of cultural artifacts, and the socioeconomic politics of suffering surrounding the experiences and representations of blacks in the United States. The book introduces the term Blackpain, defining it as a tool of national mythmaking and as a source of cultural and symbolic capital that normalizes individual suffering until the individual--the real person--disappears. Ultimately, the book investigates America's love-hate relationship with black bodies in pain.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book examines pain as one of the lasting legacies of our racialized society. This is an important topic, and Debra Walker King, a respected scholar of African American literary and cultural studies, adds immensely to our understanding of pain in the African American experience. The book, elegantly written and critically sound, is a substantial contribution to African American literary and cultural studies.

(Angelyn Mitchell, Georgetown University, author of The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction )

About the Author

Debra Walker King is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of Deep Talk: Reading African-American Literary Names (Virginia) and editor of Body Politics and the Fictional Double.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press (February 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813926807
• ISBN-13: 978-0813926803
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,317,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Healing Balm, December 31, 2009

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Change Agent (Gainesville, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: African Americans and the Culture of Pain (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture) (Paperback)

I highly recommend this book, although it is not an easy read. Not because anger dominates its pages or because of alienating rhetoric and complex theories. No. Its difficulty lays in its call for attention to the roles we all play (regardless of race, ethnicity or domestic status) in casting ownership of wounding experiences upon a culturally naturalized image of suffering: the Black body. King reveals how public displays of black bodies in pain, mutilated, mangled or murdered contributes to a national identity purged of perils, wounds and hurts that define the failed American. She argues that because "true" Americans are constructed as virtually pain-free, the graphic representation of pained Black bodies in US popular culture works to underpin and challenge national legitimacy.

In sum, the study gives voice to racial harm. While never denying the real world presence of Black people's pain within the United States, both as it exists today and historically, its author excavates it's duplicitous and often contradictory function as a metaphor which she labels blackpain--written as one word to graphically express the metaphor's conflation of wounding experiences and pain with real Black bodies.

This book is relevant to today's promise of progressive knowledge and to what current US President Barack Obama calls the "audacity of hope." It calls Americans to action in regard to how we view ourselves and those whom we dismiss or stigmatize without reflection. It challenges our hidden biases and asks for healing. King's readings transform a simple visit to the movie theatre, a glance at the newspaper, a shout in the Black church, or a restful evening before the television into opportunities for self evaluation and change. African Americans and the Culture of Pain is more than a book of superb scholarship; it is a mantra of tough love, a healing balm, an appeal for uniting a nation sometimes estranged from wholeness for lack of teasing apart and defusing the perilous symbolic power of blackpain.