Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Dark Designs and Visual Culture

  • Autor: Wallace, Michele
  • Editor: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822334279
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822386353
  • Lloc de publicació:  Durham , United States
  • Any de publicació digital: 2004
  • Mes: Desembre
  • Pàgines: 528
  • DDC: 305.896/073/09045
  • Idioma: Anglés
Michele Wallace burst into public consciousness with the 1979 publication of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, a pioneering critique of the misogyny of the Black Power movement and the effects of racism and sexism on black women. Since then, Wallace has produced an extraordinary body of journalism and criticism engaging with popular culture and gender and racial politics. This collection brings together more than fifty of the articles she has written over the past fifteen years. Included alongside many of her best-known pieces are previously unpublished essays as well as interviews conducted with Wallace about her work. Dark Designs and Visual Culture charts the development of a singular, pathbreaking black feminist consciousness.

Beginning with a new introduction in which Wallace reflects on her life and career, this volume includes other autobiographical essays; articles focused on popular culture, the arts, and literary theory; and explorations of issues in black visual culture. Wallace discusses growing up in Harlem; how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which was published when she was just twenty-seven years old; and her relationship with her family, especially her mother, the well-known artist Faith Ringgold. The many articles devoted to black visual culture range from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in nineteenth-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as Watermelon Woman, Gone with the Wind, and Paris Is Burning. Whether writing about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, rap music, the Million Man March, Toshi Reagon, multiculturalism, Marlon Riggs, or a nativity play in Bedford Stuyvesant, Wallace is a bold, incisive critic. Dark Designs and Visual Culture brings the scope of her career and thought into sharp focus.

  • C O N T E N T S
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • PART I. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL: 1989 THROUGH 2001
    • 1 Whose Town? Questioning Community and Identity
    • 2 Places I’ve Lived
    • 3 Engaging and Escaping in 1994
    • 4 To Hell and Back: On the Road with Black Feminism in the ’60s and ’70s
    • 5 Censorship and Self-Censorship
    • 6 An Interview
  • PART II. MASS CULTURE AND POPULAR JOURNALISM
    • 7 Watching Arsenio
    • 8 Black Stereotypes in Hollywood Films: ‘‘I Don’t Know Nothin’ ’Bout
    • 9 When Black Feminism Faces the Music, and the Music Is Rap
    • 10 Storytellers: The Thomas–Hill Affair
    • 11 Talking about the Gulf
    • 12 Beyond Assimilation
    • 13 ‘‘Why Women Won’t Relate to ‘Justice’ ’’: Losing Her Voice
    • 14 For Whom the Bell Tolls: Why Americans Can’t Deal with Black
    • 15 Miracle in East NewYork
  • PART III. NEW YORK POSTMODERNISM AND BLACK CULTURAL STUDIES
    • 16 The Politics of Location: Cinema/Theory/Literature/
    • 17 Black Feminist Criticism: A Politics of Location and Beloved
    • 18 Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of
    • 19 High Mass
    • 20 Symposium on Political Correctness
    • 21 The Culture War within the Culture Wars
    • 22 Boyz N the Hood and Jungle Fever
  • PART IV. MULTICULTURALISM IN THE ARTS
    • 23 Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Films
    • 24 Multicultural Blues: An Interview with MicheleWallace
    • 25 Multiculturalism and Oppositionality
    • 26 Black Women in Popular Culture: From Stereotype to Heroine
    • 27 The Search for the Good Enough Mammy: Multiculturalism,
  • PART V. HENRY LOUIS GATES AND AFRICAN AMERICAN POSTSTRUCTURALISM
    • 28 Henry Louis Gates: A Race Man and a Scholar
    • 29 If You Can’t Join ’Em, Beat ’Em: Stanley Crouch and Shaharazad Ali
    • 30 Let’s Get Serious: Marching with the Million
    • 31 Out of Step with the Million Man March
    • 32 Neither Fish nor Fowl: The Crisis of African American Gender Relations
    • 33 The Problem with Black Masculinity and Celebrity
    • 34 The Fame Game
    • 35 Skip Gates’s Africa
  • PART VI. QUEER THEORY AND VISUAL CULTURE
    • 36 Defacing History
    • 37 When Dream Girls Grow Old
    • 38 The French Collection
    • 39 Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual
    • 40 A Fierce Flame: Marlon Riggs
    • 41 ‘‘Harlem on My Mind’’
    • 42 Questions on Feminism
    • 43 Feminism, Race, and the Division of Labor
    • 44 Doin’ the Right Thing: Ten Years after She’s Gotta Have It
    • 45 The Gap Alternative
    • 46 Art on My Mind
    • 47 Pictures Can Lie
    • 48 The Hottentot Venus
    • 49 Angels in America, Paris Is Burning, and Queer Theory
    • 50 Toshi Reagon’s Birthday
    • 51 Cheryl Dunye: Sexin’ theWatermelon
    • 52 The Prison House of Culture: Why African Art? Why the Guggenheim?
    • 53 Black Female Spectatorship
    • 54 Bamboozled: The Archive
  • Index