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9781479841066 Academic Inspection Copy

Mama, Don't You Weep

Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief
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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.
Rhaisa Williams is Assistant Professor of Theater at Princeton University and author of various essays published in journals including Transforming Anthropology and College Literature.
"Mama, Don't You Weep is a beautifully written study of how black mothers have navigated the complex web of black maternal grief as commodity and embodied experience. Exploring the critical question of what happens when one's grief is stolen, Rhaisa Williams mobilizes the tools and methods of performance studies to think through about how grief has been put to work, felt, and inhabited by black mothers." - Jennifer Nash, Duke University
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