This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body; traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison; Gayl Jones; Paule Marshall; Edwidge Danticat; Jamaica Kincaid; Andrea Lee; Gloria Naylor; and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary; postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson; Carrie Mae Weems; Kara Walker; Betye Saar; and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different mediamdash;photos; collage; video; and assembled objects; as opposed to words and rhythmmdash;both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression; social transformation; and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black; female body; reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change; how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.
#3639204 in eBooks 2011-01-01 2011-01-01File Name: B00744O1EQ
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