Customer Reviews

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

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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.