Recovering the Black Female Body

Although feminists have studied the social construction of the female body for many decades, few have focused on black women. In Recovering the Black Female Body, the editors present a pioneering collection of original writings by academics and artists on æhow African-American women, from slavery to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of the dominant culture.Æ.

~Publishers Weekly

A collection of essays that examine the complex workings of race, gender and the body. Editors Bennett and Dickerson explain that it seeks to æamplifyÆ African American women writersÆ attempts to ætake back their selves and reappropriate and reconstitute a body that has often been hyperoticized or exoticized and made a site of impropriety and crime.Æ.

~WomenÆs Review of Books

By examining African American women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book not only makes a significant contribution to a body of scholarly work but also attempts to ærecoverÆ a more accurate representation of the African American female body.

~DePauw Magazine

A highly original and very informative collection of essays that theorizes the complicated intersection of the black female body and its Western symbolic meanings. The collection is essential for anyone interested in the tensions between post-structuralist and humanist understandings of subject formation, social agency, and performative identity.

~Claudia Tate, Princeton University