Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America

Micki McElya

Published by Harvard University Press 2007

Clinging to Mammy

The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America

Micki McElya

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674040793

Overview
Contents

About this book

Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya exposes the power and reach of this myth in advertising, films, and literature about the South, and in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.

Reviews

Few American icons have been as comforting or as destructive as the black mammy. If lynching was the brutal face of white supremacy, Aunt Jemima and her ilk were the face of the white fantasy of harmonious race relations. With exceptional scholarly craft, McElya reveals the distortions, hardships, and tragedy that the smiling face and jovial demeanor of the mythic black mammy were intended to obscure. This book signals the arrival of a talented new historian.
-- W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

Americans loved Aunt Jemima and their mammies. There is no more powerful and damaging popular symbol in American culture than the faithful slave in all its manifestations. McElya's sensitive, surprising, and enlightening book will make readers wonder at how desperate white America was to believe that slaves were loyal and content. This book is painfully marvelous scholarship that should reach a broad readership.
-- David Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

McElya's powerful blend of cultural and political history illuminates the ways twentieth-century white Southerners tried to maintain their historic privilege while denying the violence of their past. Following the trajectory from Aunt Jemima to Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen," Clinging to Mammy traces white Americans' efforts to define, coerce and reap the benefits of African American women's labor while maintaining a firm grip on political power.
-- Jane Dailey, author of Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

McElya shows vividly how "mammy" serves as a perfect archetype for analyzing cultural politics of race and gender, and how they changed. She gives us parlor theatrics, courtroom drama, legislative debate, and movement politics. This is a wonderfully expansive book.
-- Scott A Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

Details the tenacious hold of the “mammy” myth of contented colored folk on white public imagination.
-- Multidiversity: Myers Book Commentary

If you want to understand the ways that white women exploited black women’s domestic labor and how Hollywood and Madison Avenue went on to make billions marketing that exploitation, this is the text to read. McElya’s book clarifies why we should not expect simple or enduring political alliances based on gender unless and until we have some very serious, difficult, and sustained conversations around class and race.
-- Melissa Harris-Perry Elle

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ILLUSTRATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION: THE FAITHFUL SLAVE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. THE LIFE OF “AUNT JEMIMA” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. ANXIOUS PERFORMANCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
3. THE LINE BETWEEN MOTHER AND MAMMY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
4. MONUMENTAL POWER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
5. THE VIOLENCE OF AFFECTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
6. CONFRONTING THE MAMMY PROBLEM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
EPILOGUE: RECASTING THE FAITHFUL SLAVE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 336

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674040793