Myth Of Aunt Jemima

The Myth of Aunt Jemima is a bold and exciting look at the way three centuries of white women writers have tackled the subject of race in both Britain and America. Diane Roberts challenges the widely-held belief that white women writers have simply acquiesed in majority cultural inscriptions of race. The Myth of Aunt Jemima shows how 'the mythic spheres of race, of the separation of black and white into low and high, other and originary, tainted and pure, remain to trouble a society struggling still to free itself from debilitating racial representations.' Beautifully written with a powerful series of textual readings, The Myth of Aunt Jemima pushes at the boundaries of thought around the issues of race and gender. An important and innovative book.

The figure of the mammy occupies a central place in the lore of the Old South and has long been used to ullustrate distinct social phenomena, including racial oppression and class identity. In the early twentieth century, the mammy became immortalized as Aunt Jemima, the spokesperson for a line of ready-mixed breakfast products. Although Aunt Jemima has undergone many makeovers over the years, she apparently has not lost her commercial appeal; her face graces more than forty food products nationwide and she still resonates in some form for millions of Americans. In Slave in a Box, M.M. Manring addresses the vexing question of why the troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American culture. Manring traces the evolution of the mammy from her roots in the Old South slave reality and mythology, through reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." We learn how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South. The initial success of the Aunt Jemima brand, Manring reveals, was based on a variety of factors, from lingering attempts to reunite the country after the Civil War to marketing strategies around World War I. Her continued appeal in the late twentieth century is a more complex and disturbing phenomenon we may never fully understand. Manring suggests that by documenting Aunt Jemima's fascinating evolution, however, we can learn important lessons about our collective cultural identity.

Aunt Jemima's long history, including doll families, recipe books, kitchen utensils, menus, coloring books, and cooking sets for children can give glimpses into over a century of America's cultural history. The complete story of Aunt Jemima's Pancake Mix, the myth of Aunt Jemima herself, and the stories of the real women who portrayed her are told.

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.

In tracing black feminism in contemporary drama by black women playwrights, Lisa M. Anderson reviews the history of black feminism through analysis of plays by Pearl Cleage, Glenda Dickerson, Breena Clarke, Kia Corthron, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sharon Bridgforth, and Shirlene Holmes.Black Feminism in Contemporary Dramarepresents a cross section of women who have diverse writing and performance styles and generational differences that highlight the artistic and political breadth of black feminist theater. Anderson closely investigates each play's construction and the context of its production, including how the play critiques, shifts, or alters dominant culture stereotypes; how it positions goals of the "community"; and how it engages with the concept of art's function. She not only discusses what shapes the black feminism of these writers but also points out how the meaning of the term black feminism shifts among them.

A novella and four stories set in Mexico. In the novella, Everything About Seals, a relationship is revealed through the act of a man stalking a woman. Of the stories, Tijuana Times is on a youth gang, and Anticipating Incorporation is on a man's military service.