Dark Continent: Maids and Madams

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Maids and Madams

This discussion of The Help, has gotten me really interested in a comparison between domestic servants and race in the US and South Africa. First, I turned to Zanele Muholi’s work on what she calls domesticated labor. This first photo is from her "'Massa' and Mina(h)" project. Thanks to Ellen for helping me find these.

For her interesting statement on the project, click here.

And one of our favorites:

From interview-with-zanele-muholi/

For an extra delight, see this blog piece on Zanele’s work by the brilliant Columbia University professor Hlonipha Mokoena from the Africa is a Country blog: http://africasacountry.com/2010/12/06/anybody-can-be-a-maid/

I also asked my South African friend, Jabu Pereira, if she had seen the film. She had many insights about the problem of having the film set from the white woman’s viewpoint that echoed many of our concerns over here.

Then we turned to the experience of seeing the film in a largely white audience. She said that she was one of three black people in the theater. The white folks were quiet both throughout the film and when it was over. They didn’t even laugh at the things that were meant to be obviously funny. She said that she and her friends were cracking up but noticed how uncomfortable the rest of the people were. They must have thought: "Has this happened to me? Have I thought I was eating a delicious pie when I was eating s**t?" What I thought was over-the-top humor really hit home for some people. Who knew?

The audience Ellen and I were in was also largely white. The black people seemed very moved by The Help and were not ready to leave when it ended. We both noticed, however, that the white people laughed really loudly at any of the humor and they cleared out of the room quickly at the end. But Elle and I had different interpretations of their laughter. I thought they experienced the humor as a kind of comic relief that allowed them to escape from the tensions of the movie and dis-identify with the white racists. Ellen, on the other hand, felt that the laughter had a darker origin—most white people’s custom of laughing at black people’s ‘antics’ on screen.

Again, what I find most interesting are the contrasts. If I were starting out in my career, I’d love to do a historical study that compares domestic workers, race and class in the US and SA. There are so many similarities that the differences would illuminate so much in each culture.

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Academic Biography

Professor White's first book, Sierra Leone’s Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier, was winner of the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Price in 1987. Her book with Iris Berger, Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History, has become a standard reference text and has been translated into Japanese. Her most recent book is Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. She has been named a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sierra Leone and a Mellon Scholar and has received a Kidder-Peabody Grant for research in The Gambia. Her appointments have included chair of the Five College Black Studies Executive Committee and member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Massachusetts. She has a B.A. from Wheaton College, an M.A. in African history, and a Ph.D. in history from Boston University.

Along with her teaching and scholarly career, she has had a distinguished career in academic administration. At NYU, she was appointed Vice Provost in 2005. She advised the Provost on faculty appointments, tenure, and promotion. She worked closely with the Faculty Senators Council to enhance work-life conditions for faculty. She also spearheaded the university’s efforts to diversify the faculty and has responsibility for the Office of Academic Appointments, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Faculty Resource Network, a faculty development consortium of 52 institutions of higher education.

From 1998 to 2005, Professor White was dean of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she greatly increased the school’s visibility and reputation. From 2001-05, she was chair of NYU’s Deans Council. Prior to coming to NYU, she was a professor of history and Black studies at Hampshire College, where she also served as Dean of the School of Social Science and Dean of Faculty. While completing her Ph.D. at Boston University, she was an instructor at the University of Sierra Leone and a research assistant at the Afro-American Studies Center at Boston University.