Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged African American women

The Skin Quilt Project

Without the preservation of historical text, artifact, and art, history can slowly fade from memory. Stories of survival can easily become short-lived memories as they are passed from one generation to the next before they are forgotten. For Black African American women, their history has been and continues to be woven together in quilting. The Skin Quilt Project is a documentary featuring various quilters, artists, academics, and historians discussing the necessity, purpose, benefits, and impact of Black African American women quilters and what their artistry does for their families and communities.

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA).

Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture

Shayne Lee, an Associate Professor of Sociology and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University, sets out to make feminism more “chic” and release black women from the shackles of respectability in his latest book Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture.

Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity Within the Girls Empowerment Project

Imagining Black Womanhood by Stephanie D. Sears is a sociological account of the experiences of young African-American girls within the Girls Empowerment Project (GEP), an “Afri-centric, womanist, single-sex, after-school program” in Sun Valley, the largest housing development in Bay City, California.

All of Us

Emily Abt's emotionally stirring documentary, All of Us, takes us not just on a journey from the South Bronx to Ethiopia and back, but to a place deep within ourselves. The film follows Dr. Mehret Mandefro, as she embarks on a mission to uncover the truth behind the startling statistics regarding women of color and HIV infections in the United States. According to the film, African-American females compose approximately 12% of the population, yet according to the 2005 CDC report, a staggering 66 % of this minority accounted for new infections with the virus in the United States.

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

In Beauty Shop Politics, Tiffany M. Gill documents the central role that Black beauticians played in the struggle against Jim Crow laws. Beauty shops were one of the few industries that offered Black women some economic stability and upward mobility in the face of segregation. The industry also offered Black women a respectable alternative to domestic labor, as well as a chance to not work for White people.

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved peopl

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African Middle Class

In Beyond the Black Lady, Lisa B. Thompson analyzes representations of black middle class female sexuality in literature, theater, film, and popular culture. Her discussions highlight the need to go beyond the “overly determined racial and sexual script” to which middle class black women are expected to conform, which includes a sense of propriety and restraint as a counter to stereotypes of promiscuity that proliferate in the media.

Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

In Activist Sentiments, P. Gabrielle Foreman examines reading practices and literacies—formal and social/vernacular—among African American women from 1859 to the 1890s.
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