Not Your Mother's Mammy

TRACEY L. WALTERS is an associate professor of literature in the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University in New York, where she also holds an affiliate appointment with the Department of English and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

• List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Overview: The History of Black Women's Domestic Labor from the Twentieth Century to the PresentPart 1: Quiet Subversion: The Radical Acts of Working-Class Women in the Domestic Sphere2. Let's Hear It from the Maid: Alice Childress's Like One of the Family3. Dirty Work: The Representation of Undocumented Caribbean Domestic Laborers in Nandi Keyi's The True Nanny Diaries and Victoria Brown's Minding Ben4. Forbidden Kinship: Homoerotic Desire between the Maid and Mistress in Zanele Muholi's "Massa" and Mina(h)Part 2: We Wear the Mask: Servitude, an Art of Performance and Deception5. A Sartorial Expression of Frenchness in Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl: A Francophone Revision of Jean Genet's The Maids6. Maid in Hollywood: The Art of Performance in Theresa Harris's By the Way, Meet Vera Stark7. The Art of Dressing Up in Mary Sibande's Long Live the Dead QueenPart 3: Representing for Laure: African American / Caribbean Women's Reimaginings of Édouard Manet's Olympia8. From the Margin to the Center: The Maid in Édouard Manet's Olympia and the Politics of Recognition in the Artwork of Mickalene Thomas and Renee Cox9. Kara Walker's "Marvelous Sugar Baby 'Sphinx'": A Satirical Rendition of the MammyConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

"What Walters achieves is an aesthetic of the black female domestic, a study of the representational dynamics of the figure in film, visual art, and literature. This book is a fascinating showcase of black women's nuanced reimaginings of servitude's long afterlife."— Kevin Quashie, author of The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture"Challenging mainstream media's unidimensional portrayal and mis/representation of black female domestic workers as vulnerable and lacking agency, Not Your Mother's Mammy identifies the myriad ways domestic workers, i.e. essential services workers, engender the politics of subversion and exercise their (labor) rights. This book will certainly influence future studies on labor rights of black female domestic workers."— Simone A. James Alexander, author of African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship"Tracey Walters weaves together a fascinating story about power and representation of Black domestic workers across the globe. Her attention to Black women artists and writers offers a compelling and empowering portrait of workers who were anything but silent and deferential. These 'quiet radicals,' as Walters describes them, are inspirational models for our time. This is a book about claiming space, giving voice, and, fundamentally, about remaking Black womanhood."— Premilla Nadasen, author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement