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Article: Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women.
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of History
- Article date:
- April 1, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Canadian Journal of History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Disfigured Images is a damning indictment of one hundred years of scholarly writing on Afro-American women. It is an provocative and compelling book. In just over 150 pages, Patricia Morton surveys a vast body of historical and sociological writing to explore how black women have been treated by this "literature of fact."
While we might expect Afro-American women to be largely absent from American historiography - to be doubly invisible as women and as Afro-Americans - Morton reveals that they have "figured" to a surprising extent in scholarly writing, but their experience has been reduced to a handful of distorted images. The most enduring of these stock ...