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Full-Text Articles in American Material Culture

Who's Your Mammy?: Figuring And Refiguring Aunt Jemima, Harrison W. Inefuku May 2007

Who's Your Mammy?: Figuring And Refiguring Aunt Jemima, Harrison W. Inefuku

Harrison W. Inefuku

In existence since the late 1890s, advertising icon Aunt Jemima has been indelibly etched into the American memory—virtually unchanged from her debut until her makeover in 1989. Before this recent transformation, Aunt Jemima was the quintessential embodiment of the mammy stereotype—a heavyset black woman, complete with apron and bandana. Her creation was situated at the locus of several racist traditions and discourses directed towards African Americans—the mammy stereotype, the minstrel show, The Myth of the Old South, and the Exhibition of the Other. This embodiment of multiple racist practices helps to explain how the mammy in general, and Aunt Jemima …


Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival In Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane E. Dusselier Jan 2005

Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival In Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane E. Dusselier

Jane E. Dusselier

"Artful Identifications" offers three meanings of internment art. First, internees remade locations of imprisonment into livable places of survival. Inside places were remade as internees responded to degraded living conditions by creating furniture with discarded apple crates, cardboard, tree branches and stumps, scrap pieces of wood left behind by government carpenters, and wood lifted from guarded lumber piles. Having addressed the material conditions of their living units, internees turned their attention to aesthetic matters by creating needle crafts, wood carvings, ikebana, paintings, shell art, and kobu. Dramatic changes to outside spaces of "assembly centers" and concentration camps were also critical …