Re-Imagining Black Women

WINNER OF THE W.E.B. DUBOIS DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD, GIVEN BY THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK POLITICAL SCIENTISTSA wide-ranging Black feminist interrogation, reaching from the #MeToo movement to the legacy of gender-based violence against Black womenFrom Michelle Obama to Condoleezza Rice, Black women are uniquely scrutinized in the public eye. In Re-Imagining Black Women, Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd explores how Black women—and Blackness more broadly—are understood in our political imagination and often become the subjects of public controversy. Drawing on politics, popular culture, psychoanalysis, and more, Alexander-Floyd examines our conflicting ideas, opinions, and narratives about Black women, showing how they are equally revered and reviled as an embodiment of good and evil, cast either as victims or villains, citizens or outsiders. Ultimately, Alexander-Floyd showcases the complex experiences of Black women as political subjects. At a time of extreme racial tension, Re-Imagining Black Women provides insight into the parts that Black women play, and are expected to play, in politics and popular culture.

Alexander-Floyd has written a provocative, hard-hitting analysis of Black political matters, ranging from Condolezza Rice, to Barack Obama to Bill Cosby to R. Kelly. Bold and controversial, Re-Imagining Black Women is a must-read for scholars attempting to navigate the complex political and cultural terrain of U.S. history over the past two decades., An insightful and necessary intervention into post-politics: its origins, its intersections, and its fictive construction by the state and popular media., Drawing on political science, women and gender studies, media studies, and psychoanalysis, the author critiques an array of subjects, from Condoleezza Rice to Barack Obama, the fictional Madea, and #MeToo. This would be excellent for a senior seminar or even graduate courses.

Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics and co-editor of Black Women in Politics: Demanding Citizenship, Challenging Power, and Seeking Justice.