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Currently Promoting: See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era

By January 18, 2022May 2nd, 2023Coriolis Clients, Currently Promoting

See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era

Currently Promoting: See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era | Coriolis Company

It’s our pleasure to promote See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era, by author and professor, Tara Green, forthcoming by Rutgers University Press on February 11, 2022.

About the book:

Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure. They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Professor Green explores their challenges and achievements.

About the author:

Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA where she teaches literature and Black women’s studies courses. She is the author of Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (2018), A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009), and Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (2022), and she is the editor of two books, including From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature (2008). She is from the New Orleans area.

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