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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Mitchell, Koritha, author.

Title From slave cabins to the White House : homemade citizenship in African American culture / Koritha Mitchell.

Publication Info. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2020]
©2020

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xi, 274 pages) : illustrations.
text file
Series The new Black studies series
New Black studies series.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents House Slaves, Housekeepers, Homemakers -- A Home of One's Own -- No, Really : A Home of One's Own -- New Negroes, New Homes -- Home as Human Right and Black Power -- Still the Master's House? -- The Ultimate Home : Michelle Obama in the White House -- From Mom-in-Chief to Predator-in-Chief.
Summary Most Americans would agree that devoted wives and mothers make families strong and that strong families are the bedrock of society. Yet, throughout this nation's history, Black women have managed to become model mothers and wives, but their doing so has not kept them from being mistaken for "welfare queens" and "baby mamas," the stereotypes that most consistently shape U.S. public policy. In this book, the author shows the evolving connections between Black women's homemaking and citizenship from domesticities of the slave cabin and to Michelle Obama in the White House. Drawing on canonical texts by and about African American women, the author begins by connecting the roles of Black women as rape survivor, race mother, single lady, matriarch, the strong Black woman, and the evolving Black woman to the various roles that the site of the home served in the eras of post-emancipation, the New Negro, Civil Rights, post-civil rights, and the "post-racial." By looking at key protagonists in literary texts by authors like Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker, this book exposes readers to the palpable tension that emerges when African Americans, especially women, continue to invest in traditional domesticity even while seeing the signs that it will not yield for them the respectability and safety it should - in America, Black women might become decent housekeepers, but never homemakers. All in all, the confluence of these domestic locations and scripts shows that at every juncture, the home was a site where African American women and families negotiated and reasserted their citizenship in a society and culture that consistently and persistently continues to marginalize and assert violence against African Americans, regardless of how they met standards of respectability and citizenry. -- Provided by publisher.
Access Concurrent user level: 1 user
Subject American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism.
American literature -- African American authors.
American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
American literature -- Women authors.
Women and literature -- United States -- History.
Women and literature.
United States.
History.
African American women in literature.
African American women in literature.
African Americans in literature.
African Americans in literature.
African American women -- Intellectual life.
African American women -- Intellectual life.
African American women.
African American women -- Social life and customs.
African American women -- Social life and customs.
African Americans -- Race identity.
African Americans -- Race identity.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / General.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Added Title Homemade citizenship in African American culture
Other Form: Print version: Mitchell, Koritha. From slave cabins to the White House Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2020] 9780252043321 (DLC) 2020005316 (OCoLC)1142780003
ISBN 025205220X electronic book
9780252052200 electronic book
9780252043321 hardcover