Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture

This volume explores issues of black female identity through the various “imaginings” of the black female body in print and visual culture. Offering an exploration of the continuities and discontinuities of subjectivity and agency, this collection reveals black women’s expressivity as a multilayered enterprise, liberating and similarly confining. Thus these representations in art, literature, and culture perform a delicate and challenging dance of redemption—a redemption necessary to flesh out the precarious dynamics of being black and female at the turn of this century. Contributions emphasize the ways in which the black female body is framed and how black women (and their allies) have sought to write themselves back into social discourses on their terms.