This volume explores issues of black female identity through the various "imaginings" of the black female body in print and visual culture.  Contributions emphasize the ways in which the black female body is framed and how black women (and their allies) have sought to write themselves back into social discourses on their terms.

Public Property: On Black Women, Bodies, and First Lady Michelle Obama - Carol E. Henderson * Racing Sex~Sexing Race: The Invention of the Black Feminine Body - Kaila Adia Story * Disembodiments: Ellen Gallagher's Watery Metamorphoses - Ana Nunes * Stigmata : Embodying the Scars of Slavery - Venetria K. Patton * 'Pull Up to the Bumper': Fashion and Queerness in Grace Jones' One Man Show - Maria J. Guzman * Images that Sell: The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Ads - Michelle L. Filling * Four Women, For Women: Black Women - All Grown Up - Debra A. Powell-Wright * The Lower Stratum of History: The Grotesque Comic Stereotypes of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker - Julie Burrell * Navel-erasing: Androgyny and Self-Making in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother - Stacie Selmon McCormick * 'If Rigor is Our Dream': The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance - Zetta Elliott * "You . . .You Remind Me of . . .": A Black Feminist's Rejection of the White Imagination - Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

"Imagining the Black Female Body enters into a critical dialogue about literary and visual representations of the black female body in order to connect contemporary representations of black womanhood with an historical legacy of African American women's experiences. Captivating original essays attend to a history of abuse and pain as well as a history of joyful survival and celebration. The volume is thus inherently interdisciplinary in demonstrating how black women have sought to re-imagine their world and reconstitute how the world sees them. Students and scholars of rhetoric, visual culture, and history will find it especially resonant." - Lovalerie King, Director, Africana Research Center, Penn State University "Professor Henderson has pulled together an engaging interdisciplinary volume on a most evocative subject. Giving scholarly credit where credit is due, Imagining the Black Female Body does not however simply retread others' arguments on gender, race, sexuality, and agency, but pushes the analyses in new directions." - T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Distinguished Professor, Vanderbilt University, and author of Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women