About the AuthorBennett is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.Vanessa D. Dickerson is a professor of English at DePauw University and the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural.Michael Bennett, M.D., educated at both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, is a board-certified psychiatrist, Canadian, and Red Sox fan. He has a private practice which he's been running for almost thirty years. Michael lives with his wife in Boston.Daphne Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture.Dorri Beam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.MEREDITH GOLDSMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington.Winokur teaches film, popular culture, and American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins s Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.

• Frances Ellen Watkins sings the body electric / Michael Bennett"The deeds done in my body": black feminist theory, performance, and the truth about Adah Isaacs Menken / Daphne A. BrooksThe flower of Black female sexuality in Pauline Hopkins's Winona / Dorri Rabung BeamShopping to pass, passing to shop: bodily self-fashioning in the fiction of Nella Larsen / Meredith GoldsmithRe-locating the Black female subject: the landscape of the body in the poems of Lucille Clifton / Ajuan Maria ManceBody language: the Black female body and the word in Suzan-Lori Park's The death of the last Black man in the whole entire world / Yvette LouisDetecting bodies: Barbara Neely's domestic sleuth and the trope of the (in)visible woman / Doris WittSummoning somebody: the flesh made word in Toni Morrison's fiction / Vanessa D. DickersonOn being a fat black girl in a fat-hating culture / Margaret K. BassBody and soul: identifying (with) the Black lesbian body in Cheryl Dunye's Watermelon woman / Mark WinokurPumping iron with resistance: Carla Dunlap's Victorious body / Jacqueline E. BradyWearing your race wrong: hair, drama, and a politics of representation for African American women at play on a battlefield / Noliwe Rooks (photographs by Bill Gaskins)Afterword: recovery missions: imaging the body ideals / Deborah E. McDowell

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)

About the AuthorBennett is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.Vanessa D. Dickerson is a professor of English at DePauw University and the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural.Michael Bennett, M.D., educated at both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, is a board-certified psychiatrist, Canadian, and Red Sox fan. He has a private practice which he's been running for almost thirty years. Michael lives with his wife in Boston.Daphne Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture.Dorri Beam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.MEREDITH GOLDSMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington.Winokur teaches film, popular culture, and American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins s Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.

• Frances Ellen Watkins sings the body electric / Michael Bennett"The deeds done in my body": black feminist theory, performance, and the truth about Adah Isaacs Menken / Daphne A. BrooksThe flower of Black female sexuality in Pauline Hopkins's Winona / Dorri Rabung BeamShopping to pass, passing to shop: bodily self-fashioning in the fiction of Nella Larsen / Meredith GoldsmithRe-locating the Black female subject: the landscape of the body in the poems of Lucille Clifton / Ajuan Maria ManceBody language: the Black female body and the word in Suzan-Lori Park's The death of the last Black man in the whole entire world / Yvette LouisDetecting bodies: Barbara Neely's domestic sleuth and the trope of the (in)visible woman / Doris WittSummoning somebody: the flesh made word in Toni Morrison's fiction / Vanessa D. DickersonOn being a fat black girl in a fat-hating culture / Margaret K. BassBody and soul: identifying (with) the Black lesbian body in Cheryl Dunye's Watermelon woman / Mark WinokurPumping iron with resistance: Carla Dunlap's Victorious body / Jacqueline E. BradyWearing your race wrong: hair, drama, and a politics of representation for African American women at play on a battlefield / Noliwe Rooks (photographs by Bill Gaskins)Afterword: recovery missions: imaging the body ideals / Deborah E. McDowell

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)

About the AuthorBennett is Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University.Vanessa D. Dickerson is a professor of English at DePauw University and the author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural.Michael Bennett, M.D., educated at both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, is a board-certified psychiatrist, Canadian, and Red Sox fan. He has a private practice which he's been running for almost thirty years. Michael lives with his wife in Boston.Daphne Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture.Dorri Beam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.MEREDITH GOLDSMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington.Winokur teaches film, popular culture, and American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue), Co-Editor, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism. Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins s Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.

• Frances Ellen Watkins sings the body electric / Michael Bennett"The deeds done in my body": black feminist theory, performance, and the truth about Adah Isaacs Menken / Daphne A. BrooksThe flower of Black female sexuality in Pauline Hopkins's Winona / Dorri Rabung BeamShopping to pass, passing to shop: bodily self-fashioning in the fiction of Nella Larsen / Meredith GoldsmithRe-locating the Black female subject: the landscape of the body in the poems of Lucille Clifton / Ajuan Maria ManceBody language: the Black female body and the word in Suzan-Lori Park's The death of the last Black man in the whole entire world / Yvette LouisDetecting bodies: Barbara Neely's domestic sleuth and the trope of the (in)visible woman / Doris WittSummoning somebody: the flesh made word in Toni Morrison's fiction / Vanessa D. DickersonOn being a fat black girl in a fat-hating culture / Margaret K. BassBody and soul: identifying (with) the Black lesbian body in Cheryl Dunye's Watermelon woman / Mark WinokurPumping iron with resistance: Carla Dunlap's Victorious body / Jacqueline E. BradyWearing your race wrong: hair, drama, and a politics of representation for African American women at play on a battlefield / Noliwe Rooks (photographs by Bill Gaskins)Afterword: recovery missions: imaging the body ideals / Deborah E. McDowell

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)