48
Popular Culture Review
director Preminger; Carroll restores sexual prowess to Poitier’s staid cinematic
persona.
Whoopi Goldberg’s Book unabashedly exposes the personal areas
Dandridge and Carroll refuse to discuss. As an autobiographer, Goldberg casts
the most delicate "private parts’' into the public sphere with reckless abandon.
The comedienne’s aggressive exhibition of the penis and vagina places sex and
the myriad performances of it front and center for her audience. Goldberg
announces on the inside flap of the dust jacket that she intends to skirt "ladylike”
discretion: "I tell you, in my own inimitable way, how uproarious and
provocative this book is, how out there, and cutting edge, and whatever else I
can think to throw into the mix.” This reckless abandonment is Goldberg’s
signal of her intention to perpetuate the renegade image she instituted at the
onset of her film career. Edwards asserts, “[Goldberg]. . . who is by turns both
sexless and sensual. . . retains the skewed worldview of the comic, with a loopy
disdain for convention and a wry ‘screw you' attitude when it comes to
considering what others may think" (58).
Book's dust jacket presents the comedienne with an unconventional
look that fails to match what Bogle refers to as the Hollywood standard of
beauty; yet the text showcases a sensual and thoughtful Goldberg. In a visual
culture that traditionally adores and reveres the looks of White womanhood and,
subsequently, of those Black actresses and entertainers who possess White
features (i.e., Halle Berry, Jada Pinkett-Smith, former Miss America Vanessa
Williams, and song-stylist Alicia Keyes, to name a few), Goldberg is a virtual
iconoclast. Book allows Goldberg's nisus to construct her own version of
Hollywoodism and to interject an identity that flies in the face