Wake Up Little Susie

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 2000 - Family & Relationships - 344 pages

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature.

The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.

From inside the book

Contents

The Stick and the Carrot Public Meanings of Black and White Single Pregnancy in the PreRoe v Wade Era
20
The Making of the Matriarchy The Persistence of Biological Explanations for Black Single Pregnancy
41
The Girl Nobody Loved Psychological Explanations for White Single Pregnancy
86
Behind the Fence Maternity Homes 194565
103
The Disposition of Illegitimate Babies I The Postwar White Adoption Mandate
148
The Disposition of Illegitimate Babies II A Taxpayers Issue
187
The Population Bomb and the Sexual Revolution Toward Choice
205
The Legacy of Racialized Single Motherhood1950s and Beyond
233
Notes
249
Bibliography Essay
304
Index
333
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Page viii - It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts the body's sexuality. Sex-related differences between bodies are continually summoned as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality. Not only as testimony to, but also testimony for — in other words, as legitimation."41 The legitimizing function of gender works in many ways.

About the author (2000)

Rickie Solinger is also the author of The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law and editor of Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.