Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil [Hardcover]

'Emilie Townes is the towering womanist ethicist of our time. In this ice age of indifference and evasion, her powerful voice and viewpoint summon us. And we thank her for her vision and courage!' - Cornel West, Princeton University, USA

'In this book Emilie Townes undertakes an extraordinary inquiry into the cultural production of evil that has aimed at defining African American women as morally depraved. More specifically, she defines cultural evil as a set of romanticized images and stereotypes that originate in the imagination of whites and thereafter transformed into cultural tools of disrespect and degradation. This is a uniquely rigorous study of the internal structure of systemic evil and its pathological products namely, mammy, Aunt Jemima, Jezebel, Sapphire, Tragic Mulatta, black matriarch, welfare queen, Topsy and others. The multi-dimensional character of cultural evil necessitates a variety of descriptive voices which the author expresses by writing as ethicist, historian, narrator, and poet. Most important, Townes also provides her readers with a cultural antidote for this excellent diagnosis of an enduring cultural disease.' - Peter J. Paris, Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor, Christian Social Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA

'Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil brings together powerful contributions that rested separately in different venues. Studies of structural studies of evil are available but their interior worlds are typically absent. Those interior worlds productive of evil belong to cultural treatments that are often missing in the considerable body of sounlóx