Black Women as Cultural Readers

By Jacqueline Bobo

Book Overview

Bobo demonstrates that African-American women, as a separate interpretive community, view cultural products in a unique way. In interviews with black women, she examines their specific responses as spectators and consumers of films and novels, including Waiting to Exhale, The Color Purple, and Daughters of the Dust .

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231083955
• ISBN13: 9780231083959
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A good initial book on black female viewership

Bobo is a well-respected African-American woman in film studies. In this book, she notes the severe lack of studies out there on black female viewing habits and then presents this book as her intervention against this paucity. The book can be broken down into to parts. In one part, Bobo summarizes the feelings of a dozen black women as they watch Color Purple and Daughters of the Dust, two nominally womanist movies. In the second part, Bobo includes her own essays on why Steven Spielberg's movie betrays Walker's text, etc. This book may feel essentialist and highly unscientific to some readers. However, it was good for what it proposed. I think it would be a nice edition to any collection of texts on women of color or womanism.