American Radical
Lorraine Hansberry and the Struggle to Save the United States
Following the photographer’s suggestion, Lorraine sat at the little desk that held her modern typewriter, the tool of her trade, her mouthpiece. The place she sat when feeling sad or unsure, or just so full of feeling and wordsshe had to let them out. It was strange to sit there in her best clothes and jewelry, as if she really was this sophisticated matron. But it was important, she felt in that moment, to heed all her mother’s admonishments about being a lady and representing the family and the race well. Finally, she was a success. She could make Nannie proud. So she sat, lit a cigarette, held it between her first and second fingers, and lifted it as she often did while thinking about the next sentence or contemplating her loneliness. She took a puff, blew it out, turned to the camera, and tried to smile.
COMING SOON
Prove It On Me
New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s
In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.
