POUGHKEEPSIE, NY—Vassar Associate Professor of Film, Mia Mask’s book Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, has just been released by the University of Illinois Press.
Divas on Screen is an accessible and insightful look at five African American film icons: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Mask examines how these female stars have navigated the uneven terrain of racial, gender, and class stereotypes.
Ed Guerrero, author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film noted that in Divas on Screen, “Mia Mask deftly weaves the lines of inquiry, theory, popular culture, and history while making the complex lives of these amazing, charismatic black women accessible and understandable in fresh conceptual ways.”
Through the careful examination of previously under-analyzed films, Mask reconsiders the function of the five stars, including:
Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture;
Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons;
Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines;
Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger's narratives of success;
and an analysis of Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.
"An original and imaginative work that is full of intellectual energy, insight, and engaged writing."--Hazel V. Carby, author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America.
For additional information about Divas on Screen, see the University of Illinois Press website.
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