American Pietàs

Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal

Bibliographic Data

ID19965644
AuthorsRuby C Tapia (corresponding author)
Year2011
Pages202
Publication date2011-05-25
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueAmerican pietàs (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of Minnesota Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5749/minnesota/9780816653102.001.0001
OpenAlexW4241767436
Open LibraryOL25045701M
ISBN9780816653102
LanguageIT
Citations received3

This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, the book contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. The book explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison’s and Hollywood’s Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California’s Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the “Widows of 9/11” in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietàs as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, states this book, U.S. citizen-subjects are born—and reborn

Art · Latin American and Latino Studies · Death in art · Death in popular culture · Ethnicity · Motherhood in popular culture · Mothers in art · Pietà · Race in art · Social conditions · united states

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