At a moment where there is seemingly new interest in the visibility and study of Black women in culture and politics in the United States, Nikol Alexander-Floyd delivers a timely work that examines how Black women are contemporarily depicted and understood in US cultural-political spaces. Using the concept of “melodrama,” Alexander-Floyd fiercely interrogates the narratives about Black women being constantly and simultaneously caught between two dichotomous categories—good or evil, victims or villains, citizens or outsiders. In addition to challenging the origins of the post–Civil Rights and post-feminist eras (positing with the work of other scholars that both spaces extend beyond notions of backlash and legislative achievements), Alexander-Floyd also notes that within the dominant literature of both post–Civil Rights and post-feminist theories, there is an absence of an intersectional discourse of race, gender, and class and how these areas impact Black women. To remedy this issue, Alexander-Floyd employs terms such as “Critical Race Black Feminism” to “affirm the centrality of Black women’s experiences as the subject of research and commitment to forging Black feminist epistemologies” (p. 17). She also asserts that it is important to study television and media as political spaces because they are an extension of the systems of racialization, genderization, and classism that post–Civil Rights and post-feminist theory critique.

Divided into five chapters, the central argument of the text is that Black women are seen as liminal subjects, existing between two spectrums of positive and negative thoughts and opinions. There are several ways to interpret these narratives, including the use of psychoanalysis. Drawing heavily on the political melodrama and liminal subjects model, Alexander-Floyd applies this framework in her assessment of political and pop-cultural case studies including the melodramas of Condoleezza Rice, Michelle and Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris, Black women in Tyler Perry films, and the Bill Cosby and R. Kelly sagas. In each of these instances, Alexander-Floyd demonstrates through narrative analysis how white hetero-patriarchy is still at the center of the melodramas of Black women in politics and culture. The introductory chapter lays out Alexander-Floyd’s vision of applying a Black feminist framework to critique how race, gender, and class impact the interpretations of Black women. The first chapter is an analysis of the melodrama of Condoleezza Rice as a Black woman conservative political figure, whose position placed her as both a respectable image (i.e., a Black White House official) and a negative image (i.e., appearing as a “mammy” or “Jezebel,” according to liberal media). The second chapter addresses the “super minority” melodrama of Barack Obama to position himself as a symbolic representation of Black manhood and how that translated to providing resources and support for Black and Latino boys (i.e., My Brother’s Keeper initiative) while altogether ignoring the needs of Black girls, as directly tied to the urtext of the 1965 Moynihan Report. The third chapter is a critical analysis of Tyler Perry’s “Madea” character and the melodrama of Black women in his art—specifically, his breakout film Diary of a Mad Black Woman, in which the depictions of Black women are used to uphold common Christian, heteropatriarchal tropes in conjunction with grotesque minstrelsy imagery of Black matriarchs. The fourth chapter highlights how the melodrama of white male rape of Black women is central to American political development and the sociopsychological effects of how society handles the sexual violations of Black women. The fifth chapter summarizes the themes and methodology used in the book. Alexander-Floyd also situates her observations about the melodramas of Black women in other situations, such as the #MeToo movement and its centering of Black women’s sexual assault issues by way of the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries, responses to Michelle Obama’s Becoming book, and the future of post-politics in the COVID-19 era.

Alexander-Floyd’s work is immeasurably inspiring and intriguing, and her discussions provide a plethora of opportunities for future scholars to dig deeper and consider other topics stemming from the text. For example, in the chapter discussing the melodrama of Condoleezza Rice, Alexander-Floyd critiques Rice’s relationship with George W. Bush and how it was consistently framed in the media as falling into the mammy and Jezebel stereotypes. Future scholarship could juxtapose Alexander-Floyd’s analysis of the framing of the Rice/Bush dynamic with the framing of the “endearing” friendship between Michelle Obama and George W. Bush as discussed in the social media sphere. Another opportunity for innovative scholarship appears in the third chapter’s discussion of Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Since Tyler Perry’s ascent into mainstream media in 2005, there has also been a slow increase in the number of Black women filmmakers and screenwriters taking the helm in telling the stories of Black women in the mainstream, particularly within the last 10 years, with the rise of talents such as Michaela Coel (Chewing Gum, I May Destroy You), Issa Rae (Insecure), Misha Green (Lovecraft Country), Ava DuVernay (I Will Follow, Queen Sugar), Leigh Davenport (Run the World), Lena Waithe (Queen & Slim, The Chi), and Robin Thede (Black Lady Sketch Show). Using the methods and frameworks presented by Alexander-Floyd, future scholars may assess what the Black women characters developed by these Black women creators do for the melodrama of Black women and what traits they may express as liminal subjects.

The book itself is well written and clear, and illustrations are useful to help readers follow the logic Alexander-Floyd presents. The language and content may not be suitable for a general audience. The groups that would benefit most from reading the text are third- or fourth-year undergraduate students and graduate students with an interest in enriching their understanding of Black feminist politics. The book would also be useful in an advanced social-science research methods course as an example of how scholars can effectively use a multidisciplinary mixed methods approach in a singular study. Additionally, because of the use of an unorthodox multidisciplinary approach to the subject, this book can also be used in a myriad of academic fields including political science, Black women’s studies, sociology (media studies), and psychology. Overall, Re-Imagining Black Women accomplishes exactly what it intends to do in enhancing intellectual understanding of the current state of Black women within the context of US politics.