Author: Michele Wallace

Michele Wallace was born in 1952 in Harlem. She is the author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), Invisibility Blues (1990) and Dark Designs and Visual Culture (2004). Wallace is professor emeritus of English at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. She has a Ph.D. in cinema studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

Women Rap Back: ‘It’s My Dance and It’s My Body’

From the November/December 1990 issue of Ms. magazine: “What won’t subvert rap’s sexism is the actions of men; what will is women speaking in their own voice.”

(For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION, Alfred A. Knopf—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)

Harriet Tubman in the Art of Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold’s art on Harriet Tubman is an illustration of her capacity as an artist for taking somber stories and turning them into stories of triumph, victory and joy. 

Faith (my mother) is a fabulist whose real interest is in projecting her ideas into the future. The older I get, the more I appreciate my mother’s art, in particular her insistence upon rendering the most apparently despairing circumstances of our histories as Black folk as opportunities for spiritual and magical transcendence.