Mama's gun : black maternal figures and the politics of transgression / Marlo D. David.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

David, Marlo D., 1974- author.

Series:

Black performance and cultural criticism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American mothers in literature.

African American women in motion pictures.

Motherhood--Political aspects.

Motherhood.

Motherhood--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xvi, 217 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2016]

Summary:

In Mama's Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Mario D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding "negative" images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and "baby mamas," Mama's Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership. Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire's Push, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from "ideal." David's study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures. Book jacket.

Contents:

"I got self, pencil and notebook": literacy as maternal desire in Sapphire's PUSH

The Blues Mama in Suzan-Lori Parks's neo-segregation novel Getting mother's body

Toward a new Amerykah: the maternal "freakquencies" of Erykah Badu as mothership

"To live and reproduce, not to die": surrogacy and maternal agency in Octavia Butler's Dawn

Madea's Big happy family: Tyler Perry and the politics and performance of Big Mama drag

Transgressive black maternal figures and the future of black feminist cultural studies.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-206) and index.

ISBN:

9780814213131

0814213138

OCLC:

951415575

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description