Dark Designs & Visual Culture

A collection of writings from the '90s by the popular Black feminist scholar and journalist on film, art, and politics.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I. The Autobiographical: 1989 through 2001 1. Whose Town? Questioning Community and Identity 81 2. Places I've Lived 85 3. Engaging and Escaping in 1994 88 4. To Hell and Back: On the Road with Black Feminism in the '60s and '70s 5. Censorship and Self-Censorship 111 6. An Interview 114 Part II. Mass Culture and Popular Journalism 7. Watching Arsenio 127 8. Black Stereotypes in Hollywood Films: "I Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Birthin' No Babies!" 130 9. When Black Feminism Faces the Music, and the Music Is Rap 134 10. Storytellers: The Thomas-Hill Affair 138 11. Talking about the Gulf 141 12. Beyond Assimilation 144 13. "Why Won't Women Relate to 'Justice'": Losing Her Voice 147 14. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Why Americans Can't Deal with Black Feminist Intellectuals 149 15. Miracle in East New York 161 Part III. New York Postmodernism and Black Cultural Studies 16. The Politics of Location: Cinema/Theory/Literature/Ethnicity/Sexuality/Me 167 17. Black Feminist Criticism: A Politics of Location and Beloved 179 18. Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in African American Culture 184 19. High Mass 195 20. Symposium on Intellectual Correctness 197 21. The Culture War within the Culture Wars 202 22. Boyz N the Hood and Jungle Fever 215 Part IV. Multiculturalism in the Arts 23. Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Films 223 24. Multicultural Blues: An Interview with Michele Wallace 238 25. Multiculturalism and Oppositionality 249 26. Black Women in Popular Culture: From Stereotype to Heroine 264 27. The Search for the Good Enough Mammy: Multiculturalism, Popular Culture, and Psychoanalysis 275 Part V. Henry Louis Gates and African American Poststructuralism 28. Henry Louis Gates: A Race Man and a Scholar 289 29. If You Can't Join 'Em, Beat 'Em: Stanley Crouch and Shaharazad Ali 297 30. Let's Get Serious: Marching with the Million 309 31. Out of Step with the Million Man March 311 32. Neither Fish nor Fowl: The Crisis of African American Gender Relations 314 33. The Problem with Black Masculinity and Celebrity 318 34. The Fame Game 324 35. Skip Gates's Africa 328 Part VI. Queer Theory and Visual Culture 36. Defacing History 339 37. When Dream Girls Grow Old 353 38. The French Collection 357 39. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture 364 40. A Fierce Flame: Marlon Riggs 379 41. "Harlem on My Mind" 382 42. Questions on Feminism 386 43. Feminism, Race, and the Division of Labor 390 44. Doin' the Right Thing: Ten Years after She's Gotta Have It 401 45. The Gap Alternative 410 46. Art on My Mind 417 47. Pictures Can Lie 422 48. The Hottentot Venus 426 49. Angels in America, Paris is Burning, and Queer Theory 430 50. Toshi Reagon's Birthday 454 51. Cheryl Dunye: Sexin' the Watermelon 457 52. The Prison House of Culture: Why African Art? Why the Guggenheim? Why Now? 460 53. Black Female Spectatorship 474 54. Bamboozled: The Archive 486 Index 495