Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen

By Lisa M. Anderson

This groundbreaking book explores the history of representations of African-American women in American film and theater. Using a semiotic and critical race theory framework, Anderson examines three stereotypes of African-American women: the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Jezebel. Arguing that, because of the way that visual signs operate in a visual media culture, these stereotypes function as icons or fixed presentations of "real" individuals, Anderson considers their political and social implications and compares the stereotypes to more positive representations in works written and directed by African-American women.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847684199
• ISBN13: 9780847684199
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 1.1" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding, readable book!

This outstanding, readable book examines the images of black women on stage and film. The work, written in clear, beautiful prose, is a creative reading of the relationship between popular cultural representation and the powers of interpretation and imagery. Particularly noteworthy is the author's creative discussion of tragedy. Often, the so-called "tragic mulatta" is analyzed without a theory of tragedy at work. Anderson presents a theory from which the notion of tragedy is shown to be misguided here. Anderson traces the misgudied motif through to contemporary popular cultural representations such as Mariah Carey and Lisa Jones's recent critical work. Chapters are wonderfully characterized: "Mama on the Couch," "Mulattas, Tragedy, and Myth," "the Myth of the Whore," and "Representationand Resistance in an Antiblack World." The discussion avoids reductionism and remains atuned to the travails of contemporary race politics and theory. This is a wonderful book. It should be read widely--not only by students and scholars, but everyday folk who simply would like to gain an understanding of the powers of image and critical insight into the pitfalls of silence. Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Afro-American Studies, Contemporary Religious Thought, Latin American Studies, and Presidential Faculty Fellow of the Pembroke Center for the Study and Teaching of Women, Brown University