This insightful study places African American womens stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge; Pam Grier; Whoopi Goldberg; Oprah Winfrey; and Halle Berry. Interpreting each womans celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority; Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema; independent film; and network television.Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridges status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango; revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Griers feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful; self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldbergs transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines; while Winfreys daily television performance as self-made; self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally; Mask analyzes Berrys meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridges career made Berrys possible.
2016-08-24 2016-07-19File Name: B01KYSNWO8
Review
