We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,590,399.81 | Books Available: 787,118 | Members Online: 215

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (Constructs Series)

The Dawn at My Back Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing - Constructs Series
Author: Carroll Parrott Blue

"Having been a filmmaker most of her life, the author of this lyric book makes clear the effects of the movies on real life drama, and vice versa. She plays lights and shadows on the imagined and the real and guides the reader to a truer seeing." --Maxine Hong Kingston, author "Not since James Baldwin's essays on Hollywood films have we seen... more » such moving and insightful testimony about how commercial culture forms the frames through which we learn about individual and collective identities. With exceptional flair and vision, Blue creates a completely new form of autobiography that links the public and the private, the personal and the political, and the spectator and subject in exciting new ways." --George Lipsitz, author and historian ". . . an extraordinary first-person account of what it is like growing up as a Black woman in the South and carving out a professional life in a culture distorted by racism. It is one of those books in which one person's life illuminates the complexities of an entire society." --Howard Zinn, historian "Carroll Parrott Blue brilliantly captures the chilling interior life of her mother, a professional Black woman in twentieth-century America. This beautifully written life story combines images and illustrations, social history, film and art analysis to create a richly textured work that poignantly explores the intersection of race, gender, class, and region in the construction of a unique identity, and in so doing reveals an awesome talent." --Darlene Clark Hine, historian "Blue's words and stories lead readers into her personal and family history, which increases our own ability to contextualize how memory guides our life choices. It is a courageous book that helps us to see America through the lens of an innovative photographer, filmmaker, and passionate writer." --Deborah Willis, art historian "In Carroll Parrott Blue's provocative memoir The Dawn at My Back, a montage of words and images unfolds before us with a focused dignity. As if the narrative is moved by light and shadow, like a postmodern scrapbook of experiences and sensations, lives converge into a brilliant canvas portrayed through immense integrity and imagination. The Dawn at My Back is a delight to read and see." --Yusef Komunyakaa, poet Individual lives, viewed through the right lens, can reveal the essence of a time and place with startling clarity. In this innovative memoir, filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era. This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism--one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity--even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship. In telling this story, Blue underscores how strongly popular culture images of Blacks affected the lives of individual African Americans. She remembers movies such as Imitation of Life that she and her mother viewed together and fought about, ads that portrayed Negroes as unclean, TV shows like Amos 'n' Andy that perpetuated stereotypes--and shows how the unending barrage of demeaning images set her mother on a lifelong quest for self-improvement and middle-class respectability. Blue also describes how the same images, coupled with her mother's relentless efforts to impose essentially white standards of behavior and appearance on her daughter, created in Blue the desire to be a shaper of images rather than just a consumer, which eventually led to her becoming a photographer and filmmaker. Sweeping across the whole twentieth century, this mother-daughter story ultimately becomes a seething American history, the story of a growing African American awareness.

ISBN-13: 9780292709133
ISBN-10: 0292709137
Publication Date: 1/1/2003
Pages: 304
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: University of Texas Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> Community & Culture >> Black & African American
Biographies & Memoirs >> Community & Culture >> General
Biographies & Memoirs >> Regional U.S. >> South
Biographies & Memoirs >> Memoirs
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Specific Demographics >> African American Studies

Back to the Top ↑

Search - The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (Constructs Series)

Loading...