{"id":14025,"date":"2011-05-29T17:20:41","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T17:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14025"},"modified":"2011-05-30T02:24:35","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T02:24:35","slug":"how-to-read-michelle-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14025","title":{"rendered":"How to read Michelle Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to read Michelle Obama<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Patterns of Prejudice<\/a>
\nVolume 45, Issue 1 & 2<\/a> (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
\nPages 95 – 117
\nDOI: 10.1080\/0031322X.2011.563149<\/a><\/p>\n

Maria Lauret<\/a><\/strong>, Reader in American Studies
\nUniversity of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom<\/em><\/p>\n

Michelle Obama’s<\/a> role as the first African American First Lady<\/a> is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation as a professional woman, mother and spouse is directed towards a wider representativeness that is new in American political discourse. As a descendant of slaves and slave owners whose American ancestry can be traced back to the 1850s, she can lay claim to an African American legacy that the President lacks.<\/strong> As a result, some of her more controversial statements during the presidential campaign about the black family, class mobility and national pride need to be read in the context of an African American literature and historiography that challenges the American creed of equality, liberty and unconditional love of one’s country. Michelle Obama’s family history, her Princeton undergraduate thesis and her own words in interviews are analysed here in the discursive context of Ralph Ellison’s<\/a> Invisible Man<\/a><\/em>, Toni Morrison’s<\/a> Beloved<\/a><\/em>, Richard Powers’s<\/a> The Time of Our Singing<\/a><\/em>, and Harriet Jacobs’s<\/a> Incidents in the Life of a Slave-girl<\/a><\/em>, as well as the historiography<\/a> of the civil rights movement. Such a reading reveals how Michelle Obama’s background weaves the legacy of slavery into the American fabric, and shows that a redemptive construction of American history\u2014in which the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s<\/a> and the Obama presidency<\/a> are taken as fulfilment of the American creed (and of Martin Luther King’s<\/a> dream)\u2014must be refused if a new national self-definition with African America at its heart is to take its place.<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to read Michelle Obama Patterns of Prejudice Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011) Pages 95 – 117 DOI: 10.1080\/0031322X.2011.563149 Maria Lauret, Reader in American Studies University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom Michelle Obama’s role as the first African American First Lady is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[6464,2099,6463],"class_list":["post-14025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-maria-lauret","tag-michelle-obama","tag-patterns-of-prejudice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}