From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

"Most Americans would agree that devoted wives and mothers make families strong and that strong families are the bedrock of society. Yet, throughout this nation's history, black women have managed to become model mothers and wives, but their doing so hasnot kept them from being mistaken for "welfare queens" and "baby mamas," the stereotypes that most consistently shape U.S. public policy. In this book, Koritha Mitchell shows the evolving connections between black women's homemaking and citizenship from domesticities of the slave cabin and to Michelle Obama in the White House. Drawing on canonical texts by and about African American women, Mitchell begins by connecting the roles of black women as rape survivor, race mother, single lady, matriarch, the strong black woman, and the evolving black women to the various roles that the site of the home served in the eras of post-emancipation, the New Negro, Civil Rights, post-civil rights, and the "post-racial." By looking at key protagonists in literary texts by authors like Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker, Mitchell exposes us to the palpable tension that emerges when African Americans, especially women, continue to invest in traditional domesticity evenwhile seeing the signs that it will not yield for them the respectability and safety it should--black women might become decent housekeepers, but never homemakers. All in all, the confluence of these domestic locations and scripts shows that at every juncture, the home was a site where African American women and families negotiated and reasserted their citizenship in a society and culture that consistently and persistently continues to marginalize and assert violence against African Americans, regardlessof how they met standards of respectability and citizenry"--
Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.