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The essays in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture chart the ways that the simultaneous interrogation of gender, race, and corporeality shape the construction of black female representation. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders has enlisted a wide variety of scholarly perspectives and critical approaches about the place of black women's bodies within the American cultural consciousness. An impressive gathering of essays and visual art by feminist scholars and artists, the book presents a persuasive argument for broadening the ongoing scholarly conversations about the body. It makes clear that the most salient discourses in poststructuralist and feminist theory are made richer and more complex when the black female body is considered.
Contributors include Rachel Adams, Elizabeth Alexander, Lisa Collins, Bridgette Davis, Lisa E.Farrington, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Evelynn Hammonds, Terri Kapsalis, Jennifer L. Morgan, Siobhan B. Somerville, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carla Williams, and Doris Witt.
"Masterfully explores the painful history behind the American fascination with black female form...The mere presence of these essays serves to do what history, unfortunately, has not: rescue the black female body from 'other' status, and to celebrate it as unique, strong, and above all, beautiful"
- Village Voice
"A powerful and revealing look at the many visual, textual, and archival legacies that influence us all as we move through contemporary society."
- Womens' Review of Books
"In American culture, no subject is more central-or less analyzed-than the trope of the Black female body. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong fills a void in the scholarship and should be a key text in African=American women's and cultural studies courses."
- Paula Giggings, Professor of Afro-American Studies, Smith College