Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen [Hardcover]

Lisa Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 1997

This groundbreaking book explores the history of representations of African-American women in American film and theater. Using a semiotic and critical race theory framework, Anderson examines three stereotypes of African-American women: the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Jezebel. Arguing that, because of the way that visual signs operate in a visual media culture, these stereotypes function as icons or fixed presentations of "real" individuals, Anderson considers their political and social implications and compares the stereotypes to more positive representations in works written and directed by African-American women.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A necessary read for every young woman who wants to become the hero of her own story and not remain an appendage to someone else's. (Glenda Dickerson )

Readers have been waiting for years for a book to carry them beyond the prolegomena stage of research on black women in the proforming arts. (CHOICE )

About the Author

Lisa M. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Theater and African-American Studies at Purdue University. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (August 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0847684199
• ISBN-13: 978-0847684199
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,808,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, readable book!, September 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen (Hardcover)

This outstanding, readable book examines the images of black women on stage and film. The work, written in clear, beautiful prose, is a creative reading of the relationship between popular cultural representation and the powers of interpretation and imagery. Particularly noteworthy is the author's creative discussion of tragedy. Often, the so-called "tragic mulatta" is analyzed without a theory of tragedy at work. Anderson presents a theory from which the notion of tragedy is shown to be misguided here. Anderson traces the misgudied motif through to contemporary popular cultural representations such as Mariah Carey and Lisa Jones's recent critical work. Chapters are wonderfully characterized: "Mama on the Couch," "Mulattas, Tragedy, and Myth," "the Myth of the Whore," and "Representationand Resistance in an Antiblack World." The discussion avoids reductionism and remains atuned to the travails of contemporary race politics and theory. This is a wonderful book. It should be read widely--not only by students and scholars, but everyday folk who simply would like to gain an understanding of the powers of image and critical insight into the pitfalls of silence. Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Afro-American Studies, Contemporary Religious Thought, Latin American Studies, and Presidential Faculty Fellow of the Pembroke Center for the Study and Teaching of Women, Brown University