Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen by Lisa M. Anderson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS impenetrable stream of words, explores the failure of the 'conscious to keep the repressed, repressed. An audience is therefore denied the pleasure of easy understanding leading to a "sense of mastery" over the play, which, Wilson determines, is an "act of political resistance" on the part of Churchill. This interpretation could be applied to "My Heart," in which the action of a family preparing for the return of their daughter is repeated over and over, with increasingly bizarre deviations, and "Blue Kettle," in which the words "blue" and "kettle" invade the characters' speech and eventually replace virtually all other vocabulary. A couple of the essays are less successful. Jane de Gay's look at the role of clothing in the Open University/BBC videotape of the 1991 production of Top Girls seemed superficial and contradictory. On the one hand, she downplays the power of clothing, claiming that the applicants to the Top Girls agency fail to succeed not because of their dress, as the applicants think and as the dialogue suggests, but because they lack qualifications. On the other hand, she argues, rightly, that the play contains several "Cinderella narratives": the proper attire opens doors for women that stay open only as long as the clothing is on. Even more confounding is Joylynn Wing's essay on language in Mad Forest. Her point, that the incomprehensibility of much of the dialogue in that play (because it is in Romanian or is buried'by loud radio or crowds) is empowering and invites action, rests on an essay by Donna Haraway entitled "A Manifesto for Cyborgs." It is unclear, however, just how Wing expects an "empowered" audience to act: when she writes of a model audience interjecting itself into the staged action, are we to take that literally? Should we be jumping onto the stage, or shouting at characters from OUT seats? The great majority of the essays in Rabillard's book, however, are well reasoned and well written, and there is no question that Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations is an excellent addition to existing Churchill scholarship. LIOR AH ANNE GOLOMB, LAG UARD IA C OMMU NITY COLLEGE, CITY UNIVER S ITY OF NEW YORK LISA M. ANDERSON. Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Slage and Screen. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Pp. 147, illustrated. $22·95· Lisa M. Anderson's Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Slage and Screen is besl read as an eXlended essay, argued from a clearly articulated political stance and supported by a wide range of examples and critical approaches. Three chapters, each considering a facet of the mammy-mulatta-jezebel trio that Anderson calls "the icons of the antiblack imagination" ([20), comprise her evidence. Book-ending the study are an Book Reviews [4[ introduction entitled "Reflections of Our Lives" and a final chapter called "Representation and Resistance in an Antiblack World." It is in these framing pieces that Anderson outlines her theoretical position, which is crucial to understanding the impetus behind the book. Anderson argues that all art is inherently political and that "[aJny act of representation supports a particular view of groups of individuals" (124). Representations of black women, especially in an American context. take on even greater ideological weight: "The racial stratification of the United States ensures that there are many communities in this country whose only exposure to black people is through the media" ([). Anderson argues that there are relatively few images of black women available and that, therefore, what images do exist take on the authority of reality for white viewers: "The stage or screen image stands for black women in a way the token blacks in the office, or down the street, cannot. Thus, the white American interpretation of the black woman, as she is projected onto stage and screen, becomes the so-called real black" (I). This point is central to her thesis, and she returns to it in her conclusion , reiterating her contention that "representation is ... an agent that affects the social and political consciousness of the population.... the signs, or icons, of the black woman that have become part of popular culture come to represent all...