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Mama, Don't You Weep: Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief
Hardcover
Series: Performance and American Cultures, Book 13
General SociologyPerformance ArtWomen's Studies
ISBN13: 9781479841066
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Jan 12 2027
Pages: 240
Language: English
How Black maternal grief sustains, resists, and remakes Black life
In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to display her son's brutalized body transformed private mourning into public activism, establishing a paradigm of grief capital. In Mama, Don't You Weep, Rhaisa Kameela Williams interrogates this phenomenon, arguing that Black maternal grief functions simultaneously as a political and financial commodity and a deeply embodied experience. Williams traces how Black women navigate the murky waters where their pain is leveraged as symbolic currency--reproducible, marketable, and subject to contract--while they simultaneously perform the quiet, ongoing labor of living with loss.
Spanning the years 1955 to 1986, Williams employs performance studies to analyze the shift from the racial liberalism of the Civil Rights era to the rise of liberal multiculturalism. She examines a diverse archive, contrasting the grief tours of Mamie Till-Mobley with the debt resistance of the National Welfare Rights Organization and the creative works of Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. Williams challenges the frozen image of the strong Black mother, distinguishing between grievance--the linear, legal demand for justice--and grief, which is cyclical, messy, and pervasive. By shifting focus away from the spectacle of murdered Black men and toward the material realities of the women left behind, Mama, Don't You Weep reveals how Black maternal grief is generative, capacious, and inextricably bound to the nation's political economy.
1 different editions
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Mama, Don't You Weep: Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief
Williams, Rhaisa Kameela
Paperback
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Williams, Rhaisa Kameela
Mama, Don't You Weep: Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief
Williams, Rhaisa Kameela
Paperback
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