Description
Unflattering images of African Americans have been common in popular culture over the past 150 years - for example, the pickaninny, Little Black Sambo, and Uncle Tom. Another is Aunt Jemima, a domestic servant whose title of 'aunt' was a commonly used term of subordination and familiarity for African American domestic servants, nannies, and maids. Aunt Jemima is a caricatured jolly, fat character who has been used recently to sell commercially prepared pancake mix. In the 1972 mixed-media piece 'The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,' Betye Saar used three versions of Aunt Jemima to question and turn around such images. The oldest version is the small image at the center, in which a cartooned Jemima hitches up a squalling child on her hip. In the background, the modern version shows a thinner Jemima with lighter skin, deemphasizing her Negroid features. The older one makes Jemima a caricature, while the new one implies she is more attractive if she appears less black.
"The middle Jemima is the largest figure and the most emphasized. Her checked and polka-dotted clothing is very bright and colorful. Her black skin makes her white eyes and teeth look like dots and checks, too. This Jemima holds a rifle and pistol as well as a broom. A black-power fist makes a strong silhouette shape in front of all the figures, introduing militant power to the image. The idea of Aunt Jemima, in any of its forms, can no longer seem innocuous. Saar enshrined these images in a shallow glass display box to make them venerable. Symmetry and pattern are strong visual elements."
What are some other cultural referents that are destructive and commonly used? What symbols do we find in our current culture to define ourselves in a positive way?
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Cultural Referent Outline
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Introduction
Tragic mulatta
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Watermelon And Fried Chicken
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Insulting Words and Tomahawks and Knives and the Uncle Tom Slang
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Positive Cultural Symbols That we find today and Define Us
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Cultural Referents
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Cultural Referents
Introduction
Negative cultural referents are used to grasp fiction ideas mainly presented on social
media such as television. These cultural referents carry with them cognitive information that the
audiences are supposed to get, deduce, and generalize this information to a particular group of
people or certain people's behaviors. Most cultural referents are drawn from cultural stereotypes
assigned to different people and societies. The information depic...
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