Review by Princeton University professor of 2002 anthology edited by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Citing quotes from "Olympia's Maid" by two different authors, calls O'Grady's article a "critical frame for the volume's main goals."
© African American Review, 2005
This well-conceived volume organizes 13 recent essays on the Black female body into a highly readable collection that not only provides an overview of scholarship in the field but also begins to chart new directions for further work. Three features distinguish the collection: first, the range of disciplinary approaches (contributions appear from scholars of history, literature, art history, history of science, performance studies, Women's Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, photography and film); second, the emphasis on visual images; and third, the productive conversation stimulated across the volume's multiple sections. Editor Kimberly Wallace-Sanders deserves credit not only for the strength of her selections but also for the productive arrangement of the volume itself. Unlike many essay collections that are too often mined only for their most valuable nuggets, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong presents a coherent, multidisciplinary research and teaching tool made all the more effective by the volume's overlapping concerns.
A brief introduction by Wallace-Sanders opens the collection, which is then divided into three main sections. The first section establishes broad historical, geographic, and iconographic frameworks for understanding
and interpreting Black female subjectivity in American culture. Contributors to this unit include Beverly Guy-Sheftall on black female sexuality and the 19th-century Euro-American imagination, Jennifer L. Morgan on the gendering of racial ideology in early modern European travel writing, and Anne Fausto-Sterling on early-19th-century European constructions of "Hottentot" women. Together all three essays make vivid the disturbing welter of (to paraphrase Morgan) pseudo-scientific "ideas and information," both discursive and visual, about Black women--particularly their supposed savage animality and lascivious sexuality--that both predated and continues to shape western encounters with female Black bodies.
The second section of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong draws implicitly and explicitly on these multiple frameworks to examine the "symbolic power" (6) of the Black female body in 19th- and 20th-century American visual culture and literary texts. The wide-ranging essays include contributions by Lisa Collins on the Black female nude, by Lisa E. Farrington on Faith Ringgold's Slave Rape multimedia series, Rachel Adams on "wildness" in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Carla Williams on photography and the Black female body
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© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.