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Black Women in American Film
University of Illinois Press
June 2009
On Sale: June 15, 2009
320 pages
ISBN: 0252076192
EAN: 9780252076190
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction
This insightful study places African American women's
stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining
the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy
Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and
Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as
predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask
shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the
conventional discursive practices through which blackness
and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema,
independent film, and network television. Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet
underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a
sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the
contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in
segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp
performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and
The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation
vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension
between representing African American women as both
objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and
The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic
routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as
self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of
success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by
acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made
Berry's possible.
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