Clinging to Mammy

Clinging to Mammy
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 348
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0674024338
ISBN-13 : 9780674024335
Rating : 4/5 (335 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Clinging to Mammy by : Micki McElya

Download or read book Clinging to Mammy written by Micki McElya and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Aunt Jemima beamed at Americans from the pancake mix box on grocery shelves, many felt reassured by her broad smile that she and her product were dependable. She was everyone's mammy, the faithful slave who was content to cook and care for whites, no matter how grueling the labor, because she loved them. This far-reaching image of the nurturing black mother exercises a tenacious hold on the American imagination. Micki McElya examines why we cling to mammy. She argues that the figure of the loyal slave has played a powerful role in modern American politics and culture. Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black people's contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. African American resistance to this notion was varied but often placed new constraints on black women. McElya's stories of faithful slaves expose the power and reach of the myth, not only in popular advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, white women's minstrelsy, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement. The color line and the vision of interracial motherly affection that helped maintain it have persisted into the twenty-first century. If we are to reckon with the continuing legacy of slavery in the United States, McElya argues, we must confront the depths of our desire for mammy and recognize its full racial implications.


Clinging to Mammy Related Books

Clinging to Mammy
Language: en
Pages: 348
Authors: Micki McElya
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007-10-31 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

GET EBOOK

When Aunt Jemima beamed at Americans from the pancake mix box on grocery shelves, many felt reassured by her broad smile that she and her product were dependabl
Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies
Language: en
Pages: 238
Authors: Patricia Ann Turner
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2002 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

Exploring white American popular culture of the past century and a half, Turner details subtle and not-so-subtle negative tropes and images of black people, fro
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
Language: en
Pages: 212
Authors: Emilie M. Townes
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-11-13 - Publisher: Springer

GET EBOOK

This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as r
Racial Innocence
Language: en
Pages: 328
Authors: Robin Bernstein
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-12 - Publisher: NYU Press

GET EBOOK

"In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth centur
Migrating to the Movies
Language: en
Pages: 506
Authors: Jacqueline Najuma Stewart
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-03-28 - Publisher: Univ of California Press

GET EBOOK

The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of Africa