Not Your Mother's Mammy : : The Black Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Women’s Media / / Tracey L Walters.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Architecture and Design 2021
• VerfasserIn: Walters, Tracey L,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.) :; 4 color images

Not Your Mother’s Mammy examines how black artists of the African diaspora, many of them former domestics, reconstruct the black female subjectivities of domestics in fiction, film, and visual and performance art. In doing so, they undermine one-dimensional images of black domestics as victims lacking voice and agency and prove domestic workers are more than the aprons they wear. An analysis of selected media by Alice Childress, Nandi Keyi, Victoria Brown, Kara Walker, Mikalene Thomas, Rene Cox, Lynn Nottage, and others provides examples of generations of domestics who challenged their performative roles of subservience by engaging in subversive actions contradicting the image of the deferential black maid. Through verbal confrontation, mobilization, passive resistance, and performance, black domestics find their voices, exercise their power, and maintain their dignity in the face of humiliation. Not Your Mother’s Mammy brings to life stories of domestics often neglected in academic studies, such as the complexity of interracial homoerotic relationships between workers and employers, or the mental health challenges of domestics that lead to depression and suicide. In line with international movements like #MeToo and #timesup, the women in these stories demand to be heard.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1. Overview: The History of Black Women’s Domestic Labor from the Twentieth Century to the Present -- Part 1: Quiet Subversion: The Radical Acts of Working-Class Women in the Domestic Sphere -- 2. Let’s Hear It from the Maid: Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family -- 3. Dirty Work: The Representation of Undocumented Caribbean Domestic Laborers in Nandi Keyi’s The True Nanny Diaries and Victoria Brown’s Minding Ben -- 4. Forbidden Kinship: Homoerotic Desire between the Maid and Mistress in Zanele Muholi’s “Massa” and Mina(h) -- Part 2: We Wear the Mask: Servitude, an Art of Performance and Deception -- 5. A Sartorial Expression of Frenchness in Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl: A Francophone Revision of Jean Genet’s The Maids -- 6. Maid in Hollywood: The Art of Performance in Theresa Harris’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark -- 7. The Art of Dressing Up in Mary Sibande’s Long Live the Dead Queen -- Part 3: Representing for Laure: African American / Caribbean Women’s Reimaginings of Édouard Manet’s Olympia -- 8. From the Margin to the Center: The Maid in Édouard Manet’s Olympia and the Politics of Recognition in the Artwork of Mickalene Thomas and Renee Cox -- 9. Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby ‘Sphinx’: A Satirical Rendition of the Mammy -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- About the Author