The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, and: Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (review)

It is with considerable pleasure and interest that I review The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling by Rebecca Wanzo and Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance by Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant. Each book opens up fresh transdisciplinary bodies of feminist inquiry. Readers will find that both authors uniquely contribute to current feminist scholarship by carefully analyzing the uses and misuses of eminent tropes of U.S. black femininity that deny holistic representations and portrayals of African American women. Wanzo and Beauboeuf-Lafontant staunchly engage the question of black women's suffering in the face of the intersecting effects of racism, racialized poverty, sexism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism. Wanzo traces the media's habitual practice of denying black women's vulnerability by not covering the murders, disappearances, rapes, and human rights abuses perpetuated against black women. In Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman, Beaubouef-Lafontant argues that the myth of the black superwoman works to maintain social domination by damaging the emotional health and well-being of black women. Her work explores how the internalization of the myth of black women's supposed super-human strength may result in high rates of eating disorders, socially rooted depression, and emotional exhaustion among black women today. Both books suggest that black women themselves may inadvertently collude in the complex system of public lies and controlling images by uncritically taking up liberal sentimentality and the myth of black women's strength to avoid being viewed as weak or vulnerable.

In The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, Wanzo asks: Which stories of black women's suffering get told, which ones get ignored, and for what reasons? She begins by questioning whether the privileging of whiteness created a severe imbalance of media coverage of notable women in the second Iraq War. She questions why Jessica Lynch, a young, white, blond-haired kindergarten teacher became the "face of American heroism," while the national sacrifices of Shoshana Johnson, the first African American woman prisoner of war in U.S. history, and Lori Pestiewa, the first Native American woman who died as a soldier in the U.S. Army, were generally ignored by the media. To explore answers to these questions, Wanzo examines the relationship among race, gender, and stories of suffering in various public discourses. She argues that the mobilization of affect through sentimental storytelling produces certain stories of suffering, but not others. She argues that liberal sentimentality—rooted in rhetorical practices of equality, heteronormativity, and whiteness—produces cultural narratives about which victims are "naturally" worthy of compassion and public sympathy and which are not. Her book traces the recurrent narrative conventions of sentimentality in the United States, with special attention paid to representations of black women in novels, autobiographies, talk shows, cable news shows, and medical discourses. She exposes how only those black women who conform to the dictates of white heteronormativity—often fair-skinned, pious, pretty, respectable, and who publically embark upon a trajectory of personal introspection and change, rather than social critique—are worthy of the status of victim and thus public sympathy. She identifies this pattern in early American literature, coverage of the civil rights movement, and in the media's failure to cover the recent murders, disappearances, and rapes of black women.

Wanzo's book is truly an historical tour de force. She makes extraordinary use of literary and cultural studies frameworks to demonstrate how sentimental storytelling works to preserve and reinscribe racial, economic, gender, sexual, and suffering hierarchies...