Wallace's writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a leader of African-American intellectuals.
[2] Her father died of a drug overdose when Wallace was 13, and her later clashes with her mother led to her being sent to a Catholic reform school for several weeks as a child.
[3] Michele and her sister were later raised by their mother and stepfather Burdette "Birdie" Ringgold in Harlem's exclusive Sugar Hill district.
[12] The book criticizes black men and the Civil Rights Movement for its injurious acceptance of white society's notion of manhood.
[13] Combining personal anecdotes with social, cultural, and historical analysis, Wallace also reflects on her subject position as an educated middle-class black woman.
[16] The work was criticized by intellectuals, political figures, and feminists including Angela Davis and even Wallace's mother Faith Ringgold who ultimately wrote a book in response.
[17] A review of Black Macho in The Village Voice called the book "an elusive work... [whose] pages offer autobiography, historical information, sociology, and mere opinion dressed up to resemble analysis.
This issue featured responses to Staples from prominent black scholars and activists including June Jordan, Maulana Karenga, and Audre Lorde.
[22] This social commentary, including a total of 24 essays written from 1972 to 1990, aims to highlight the experiences of Black women in American culture from a different viewpoint from that of white middle-class feminists.
This dissertation explicates white supremacist terms adapted from a plantation slavery context, which generated the criteria of racial hierarchy and the proclivity towards lynching as an expression of its greatest failure and also discusses the responses of black intellectuals W. E. B.
Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Anna J. Cooper to the formulation of these social and cultural restrictions and limitations imposed upon the descendants of former slaves.
Combinations of race and gender) are concretized in visual imagery in fine art, illustration, material culture, photography, performance and practices of human display in natural history museums, zoos, and world's fairs.
[25] Dark Designs and Visual Culture, published in 2004, is a collection containing more than fifty articles that Michele Wallace wrote over the previous 15 years, including some of her most notable pieces as well as interviews conducted about her work.
Dark Designs and Visual Culture charts the development of a black feminist consciousness and brings the scope of Wallace's career into focus.
Wallace begins the collection with a reflection of her life and career through essays and articles focused on popular culture, as well as literary theory, and issues in black visual culture ranging from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in 19th-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as The Watermelon Woman (1996), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Paris Is Burning (1990).
Wallace goes on to discuss life growing up in Harlem, her relationship with her mother Faith Ringgold, and how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for her 1979 work Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.