Re-Imagining Black Women dissects “post-politics”—the repertoire of dominant fantasies, frames, and narratives that hope for an afterlife beyond the social activism of the mid-twentieth century. This push for post-politics, such as post-feminism or post-racial thinking, serves as a form of race, gender, and class management that is uniquely suited for this neoliberal era. Alexander-Floyd centers black women as subjects, locating Moynihan’s black cultural pathology melodrama as the earliest basis for neoliberalism’s focus on self-regulation, solidifying patriarchal family formations, and the sp ... More

Re-Imagining Black Women dissects “post-politics”—the repertoire of dominant fantasies, frames, and narratives that hope for an afterlife beyond the social activism of the mid-twentieth century. This push for post-politics, such as post-feminism or post-racial thinking, serves as a form of race, gender, and class management that is uniquely suited for this neoliberal era. Alexander-Floyd centers black women as subjects, locating Moynihan’s black cultural pathology melodrama as the earliest basis for neoliberalism’s focus on self-regulation, solidifying patriarchal family formations, and the splitting of groups into virtuous victors who are worthy citizen subjects versus villainous, abject others in need of rehabilitation. Forging a unique methodology that fuses insights and approaches from political science, women’s studies, black studies, media studies, and most notably psychoanalysis, Re-Imagining Black Women provides a tour-de-force of black politics, exposing and addressing gender and other elements repressed or disavowed in the study of US race and politics. Each chapter traces the interplay of melodrama and liminality, examining political figures, such as Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama and his My Brother’s Keeper initiative; cultural sites, such as The Help and Tyler Perry’s Madea; white male rape of black women and the social contract; and black women and the MeToo movement. This study helps to explain how some people were seduced by post-racial, post-feminist fantasies, exposing the primary ways in which they still operate. Re-Imagining Black Women also discusses post-politics in the COVID-19 era. It is a pioneering work that helps readers understand contemporary culture and politics and equips them to navigate turbulent political futures.