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Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory by Kimberly Wallace- Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 208 pp., $40.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern by Jayna Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 339 pp., $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paper.
Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage by Susan Thomas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 264 pp., $40.00 hardcover.
Audrey Thomas McCluskey
What these three books have in common is their intent. That intent is to bring new insights and fresh perspectives to topics that have not only influenced popular culture, but, in some instances, have become infused into our racial imaginary. Black women as mammies, international entertainers, and as the force behind the development of the most popular form of entertainment in prerevolutionary Cuba are the subjects in these timely new tomes. Yet these works are also very different and deserve to be considered on their individual merits.
When Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy, the devoted slave/servant in Gone with the Wind (1939), she said in her joyous acceptance speech that she wanted it to honor black womanhood and to be "a credit to her race." The twofold reaction of black leaders, who praised this breakthrough for a black actor but criticized the sassy though subservient character she portrayed, reflects the contradictions that are present in this weighted emblem of Americana. Who is Mammy and where did she come from? How did she come to embody the heavy burden of racial mythology and history?
These are questions at the core of Kimberly Wallace-Sanders's Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory on this perennially haunting figure in the American imaginary. The staying power of Mammy's larger-thanlife persona is fraught with all manner of psychological attachments and racial yearning. Her healthy pulchritude and happy visage have evoked both scorn and praise, while serving as an inspiration for visual artists such as Betye Saar, Murray De Pillars, and Andy Warhol, and as the subject of scores of literary renderings. The fixation on Mammy and its hold on the American psyche is a "troubled marriage of racial and gender essentialism,"...