Call for Paper: Imagining the Black Female Body

Text and Contexts in Literature and Culture

Hortense Spillers said it best when she proclaimed: Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches,’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’….or ‘Black Woman at the Podium.’ I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. Spillers’ posturing points to the complex and delicate challenges black women encounter in the minefield of mental, spiritual, and cultural “codings” that, as Spillers stresses, create markers of identity so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is “no easy way for the agents buried beneath to come clean.”

But what is it about black women’s identity that makes them marked women? What is it about their presence—their essence—that makes them a threat in some social circles? Much of this uneasiness can be traced to the tension that exists between the real and imagined properties of black womanhood that circulate in America’s Grammar book (borrowing from Hortense Spillers). This book, a virtual roadmap of the history that has created and sustained the false imaginings of a culture bent on promoting whiteness and its privileges, distorts the ideal of black womanhood.

What this volume proposes to do is explore the various “imaginings” of the black female body in print and visual culture, sports, America’s iconic landscape (i.e. the mammy figure and the video vixen), politics, and law. Contributors can also write on literature, science, music, photography, or the fashion industry. Papers should discuss not only how this black female body is framed, but also how black women (and their allies) have sought to write/rite themselves back into these social discourses on their terms. It is my hope that this volume will create a dialogue with other outstanding volumes on the black female body.

If you are interested in being a part of this book, please forward to me an abstract by January 15, 2008. Entire papers will be due by September 1, 2008. You can send your abstract via email to ceh@udel.edu. Or you may send your abstract by landmail to:

Dr. Carol E. Henderson
Associate Professor of English and Black American Studies
212 Memorial Hall
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716.