From Blaxploitation to Black Macho

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-201
Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Ntozake Shange ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Women Writers

For commentators concerned with black cultural production in the contemporary era, there are few images more controversial than the angry black woman, particularly as it is reproduced within the confines of reality television. This chapter traces the lineage of the angry black woman back to key black feminist texts of the 1970s, arguing that the trope emerges out of a distinct sociopolitical history that was codified within both public policy and popular culture throughout the decade. Blaxploitation films became the site where black women’s anger was most visibly commodified, even as black women involved in an emergent black feminist movement worked to combat withering social commentaries that included Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s matriarchy thesis and sexist takedowns of black women writers like Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace.

scholarly journals “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored”: The Metaphysical Dilemma in Ntozake Shange, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Flávia Santos De Araújo
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Ntozake Shange ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Sherley Anne Williams ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Textual Representations ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Sherley Ann Williams

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sherley Ann Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange’s trope of the “methaphysical dilemma” to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers’ textual representations of black women’s bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as “primitive” or “unbridled” (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some of the artistic/literary strategies contemporary black women writers use to re-claim the power of voice/voicing as they depict black women’s subjectivities as unfinished, complex, but self-fashioned creations.

scholarly journals Memeification of Black Women’s Trauma

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Stravens
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The People ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
History Of

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Calvin Hernton
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Women Writers

Black Women Writers Visit Cuba

1985 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 61-61
Author(s):  
Jayne Cortez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Women Writers
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