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Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory

Overview

Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory, first published in 1990 and considered a landmark in the history of Black feminism, highlights the work of her mother, artist Faith Ringgold, and then moves onto examining her own life growing up in Harlem, the Black experience, and her life later as a writer in the 1970's. In addition, Wallace explores the continued underrespresentation of black voices in politics, media, and culture and further addresses the tensions between race, class, gender, and society while also highlighting figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. This social commentary including a total of 24 essays written from 1972 to 1990, aims to highlight the experiences of Black women in American culture from a different viewpoint than white middle-class feminists.

Black Popular Culture

Overview

Black Popular Culture, published in 1992 includes discusses a wide range of cultural issues and critical theory including urban planning to literature. Additionally, the book was recognized as a Village Voice Best Book of the Year.

Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow: A Genealogy of Race and Gender in U.S. Visual Culture

Overview

This dissertation published in 1999, focuses on examining race and gender ideologies at the turn of the century generated by U.S. imperialism and the world's fair movement as manifested in visual culture, especially visual art, popular culture and cinema. The first half of this dissertation explores trends in visual culture within the United States wherein the second half focuses on the emergence of Afro-American and black images in silent cinema including various film versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates.. This dissertation explicates white supremacist terms adapted from a plantation slavery context, which generated the criteria of racial hierarchy and the proclivity towards lynching as an expression of its greatest failure and also discusses the responses of black intellectuals W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Anna J. Cooper to the formulation of these social and cultural restrictions and limitations imposed upon the descendants of former slaves. Combinations of race and gender) are concretized in visual imagery in fine art, illustration, material culture, photography, performance and practices of human display in natural history museums, zoos, and world's fairs.

Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Overview

Dark Designs and Visual Culture published in 2004, is a collection containing more than fifty articles that MIchele Wallace wrote over the past fifteen years and include some of her most notable pieces as well as interviews conducted about her work. Dark Designs and Visual Culture charts the development of a black feminist consciousness and bring the scope of Wallace's career into focus. Wallace begins the collection through a reflection of her life and career that include essays, articles focused on popular culture as well as literary theory, and issues in black visual culture ranging from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in nineteenth-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as Watermelon Woman, Gone with the Wind, and Paris Is Burning. Wallace goes onto discuss life growing up in Harlem, her relationship with her mother Faith Ringgold, and how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for her work in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.

Books

• Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), ISBN 978-1859842966
• Faith Ringgold: Twenty Years of Painting, Sculpture and Performances (ed. 1984)
• Invisibility Blues: From Pop To Theory (1990), ISBN 978-1859844878
• Black Popular Culture, with Gina Dent (1992), ISBN 978-1565844599
• Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow: A Genealogy of Race and Gender in U.S. Visual Culture, 1895–1929 (1999)
• Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2004), ISBN 978-0822334132
• Declaration of Independence, Fifty Years of Art by Faith Ringgold (2009)
• American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's Paintings of the 1960's (2010)