Shadow Bodies

JULIA S. JORDAN-ZACHERY is a professor of public and community service and director of the Black Studies Program at Providence College in Rhode Island. She is the author of the award-winning book Black Women, Cultural Images, and Social Policy.

"Shadow Bodies engages the work of Hurston and Morrison, Beyonce and Rihanna, in a theoretically nuanced examination of the scripts of Black Women’s bodies in popular and political culture. It highlights the material consequences of silence and rhetoric, and is an extraordinarily good example of interdisciplinary, intersectional, engaged political science."- Renee Ann Cramer (author of Pregnant with the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump) “Shadow Bodies takes the reader on a sobering journey through aspects of black womanhood that are usually divorced from social scientific inquiry: how personal experiences with and public discourses about domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, and mental illness shape black women’s political socialization. Embracing classic formulations in black feminist thought, the author bravely exposes and deconstructs the forced silences that black women must break as we move ever more fully into American public life.”- Zenzele Isoke (author of Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance)