The Mammy is “so closely related to the comic coons that she is usually relegated to their ranks. Mammy is distinguished, however, by her sex and her fierce independence. She is usually big, fat, and cantankerous.
— Donald Bogle, 2001
Handout made in collaboration with Teana Boston-Mammah and Jan van Heemst for the project on Cultural Diversity Q7/8 as part of the Social Practice of the Willem de Kooning Academy
“Now part of what”…“I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race— whether white or black” —Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Mark Dery, 1994
