Mammy. Jezebel. Matriarch. Welfare Queen. This first-year seminar introduces students to the experience of African American women through the study of representation and counter-representation in the past and present. We will pinpoint and trace racialized and gendered images of Black women in American history, considering the ideologies that gave rise to them and the political applications that sustained them. In addition, we will read contemporary commentary about how and why these derogatory stereotypes persist today. Critically important to our course of study will be an examination of the many ways in which Black women intellectuals and creative writers have challenged, rejected, redeployed, and transformed these images. Our class will begin with sustained coverage of the period of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in America, shift into public policy and popular culture imagery in the early through the late twentieth century, and conclude with discussion of the political and psychological effects of “controlling images” on Black women’s lives. Our course activities will include readings in history, feminist theory, cultural criticism, and fiction, as well as local historical site visits and documentary film viewing.