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

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