Review of Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood, by Marquita M. Gammage

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves (Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers, 2004). Hudson-Weems identified 18 culturally grounded characteristics of Africana womanhood. “Self-definer” is one of these.

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2002), xii. Collins asserts that her work is not “afrocentric” due to some “major areas of disagreement, primarily concerning the treatment of gender and sexuality.”.

Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by J. Alexander and C. Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 93–104.

Black feminists Drs. Kaila Story, Yaba Blay, Treva Lindsay, Brittany Cooper, and Joan Morgan, have presented together on panels and other platforms about the importance of altering our viewing practice so that we can appreciate what the mainstream media offer us in terms of visual representations of Black life and peoplehood. They call for a critical celebration of the portrayals of Black women in shows like Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and so on.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sureshi M. Jayawardene

Sureshi M. Jayawardene is a Ph.D. Candidate of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on questions of identity and belonging among diasporic Africans in South Asia as a result of the Indian Ocean slave trade.