Subtitle: Self-Representations by African American Women
Author: Edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson
Subject: Women's Studies/African American Studies/Literary Studies
Paper ISBN 0-8135-2839-9
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2838-0
Pages: 331 pp., 11 b&w illus.
Description: This book explores how 19th and 20th century African American women have represented their own bodies in opposition to dominant cultural images

"Although feminists have studied the social construction of the female body for many decades, few have focused on black women. In Recovering the Black Female Body, the editors present a pioneering collection of original writings by academics and artists on how African-American women, from slavery to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of the dominant culture."--Publishers Weekly

"A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings. The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity."--Claudia Tate, Princeton University

Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating 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 to either 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 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.

Michael Bennett is an associate professor of English at Long Island University and coeditor of The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Vanessa D. Dickerson is an associate professor of English at DePauw University. She is the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, and editor of Keeping the Victorian House.