New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
272
New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
272eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090820 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 445 KB |
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New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
By Barbara Christian
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2007 Najuma HendersonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03180-9
Chapter One
But What Do We think We're Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a little Bit of history (1989)
In August 1974, a rather unique event occurred. Black World, probably the most widely read publication of Afro-American literature, culture, and political thought at that time, used on its cover a picture of the then practically unknown writer Zora Neale Hurston. Under Zora's then unfamiliar photograph was a caption in bold letters, "Black Women Image Makers," which was the title of the essay by Mary Helen Washington featured in the issue. Alongside the Washington essay were three other pieces: an essay now considered a classic, June Jordan's "On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes Towards a Balancing of Love and Hate"; an essay on major works of Zora Neale Hurston, "The Novelist/Anthropologist/Life Work," by poet Ellease Southerland; and a short piece criticizing the television version of Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by black psychologist Alvin Ramsey. It was not particularly striking that the image of a black woman writer graced the cover of Black World; Gwendolyn Brooks's picture, for example, had appeared on a previous Black World cover. Nor was it especially noteworthy that literary analyses of an Afro-American woman writer appeared in that journal. That certainly had occurred before. What was so striking about this issue of Black World was the tone of the individual pieces and the effect of their juxtaposition.
Mary Helen Washington's essay sounded a strong chord-that there was indeed a growing number of contemporary Afro-American women writers whose perspective underlined the centrality of women's lives to their creative vision. June Jordan's essay placed Hurston, a relatively unknown Afro-American woman writer, alongside Richard Wright, who is probably the best known of Afro-American writers, and illuminated how their apparently antithetical worldviews were both necessary ways of viewing the complexity of Afro-American life, which Jordan made clear was not monolithic. Ellease Southerland reviewed many of Hurston's works, pointing out their significance to Afro-American literature and therefore indicating the existence of major Afro-American women writers in the past. And in criticizing the television version of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ramsey objected that that commercial white medium had omitted the message of struggle in Ernest Gaines's novel and turned it into an individual woman's story-a foreshadowing of criticism that would be repeated when, periodically, images of black women from literature were translated into visual media.
What the configuration of the August 1974 Black World suggested to me, as I am sure it did to others, was the growing visibility of Afro-American women and the significant impact they were having on contemporary black culture. The articulation of that impact had been the basis for Toni Cade's edition of The Black Woman in 1970. But that collection had not dealt specifically with literature/creativity. Coupled with the publication of Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" only a few months before in the May issue of Ms., the August 1974 Black World signaled a shift in position among those interested in Afro-American literature about women's creativity. Perhaps because I had experienced a decade of the intense literary activity of the 1960s, but also much anti-female black cultural nationalist rhetoric, these two publications had a lightning effect on me. Afro-American women were making public, were able to make public, their search for themselves in literary culture.
I begin my reflections on the state (history) of black feminist criticism(s) with this memory because it seems to me we so quickly forget the recent past. Perhaps some of us have never known it. Like many of us who lived through the literary activism of the sixties, we of the eighties may forget that which just recently preceded us and may therefore misconstrue the period in which we are acting.
Less than twenty years ago, without using the self-consciously academic word theory, Mary Helen Washington articulated a concept that was original, startling even, to many of us immersed in the study of Afro-American literature, among whom were few academics, who knew little or cared less about this literature. In "Black Women Image Makers" Washington stated what for me is still a basic tenet of black feminist criticism: "We should be about the business of reading, absorbing, and giving critical attention to those writers whose understanding of the black woman can take us further" (emphasis mine). The names of the writers Washington listed, with the exception of Gwendolyn Brooks, were then all virtually unknown; interestingly, after a period when poetry and drama were the preeminent genre of Afro-American literature, practically all of these writers-Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker-were practicing fiction writers. While all of the writers were contemporary, Washington implied through her analysis that their vision and craft suggested that previous Afro-American women writers existed. Hence Zora Neale Hurston's picture on the cover of this issue connoted a specific meaning-that of a literary foremother who had been neglected by Afro-Americanists of the past but who was finally being recognized by her daughters and reinstated as a major figure in the Afro-American literary tradition.
It is important for us to remember that in 1974, even before the publication of Robert Hemenway's biography of Hurston in 1977 or the reissuing of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the articulation of the possibility of a tradition of Afro-American women writers occurred not in a fancy academic journal but in two magazines: Ms., a new popular magazine that came out of the women's movement, and Black World, a long-standing black journal unknown to most academics and possibly scorned by some.
Walker's essay and Black World's August 1974 issue gave me a focus and are the recognizable points that I can recall as to when I consciously began to work on black women writers. I had, of course, unconsciously begun my own search before reading those pieces. I had spent some portion of the late sixties and early seventies asking my "elders" in the black arts movement whether there were black women who had written before Gwendolyn Brooks or Lorraine Hansberry. Younger poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Rodgers, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde were, of course, quite visible by that time. And by 1974, Morrison and Walker had each published a novel. But only through accident or sheer stint of effort did I discover Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) or Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)-an indication that the contemporary writers I was then reading might too fade into oblivion. Although in the sixties the works of neglected Afro-American male writers of the Harlem Renaissance were beginning to resurface, for example, Jean Toomer's Cane, I was told the women writers of that period were terrible-not worth my trouble. However, because of the conjuncture of the black arts movement and the women's movement, I asked questions I probably would not have otherwise thought of.
If movements have any effect, it is to give us a context within which to imagine questions we would not have imagined before, to ask questions we might not have asked before. The publication of the Black World August 1974 issue as well as Walker's essay was rooted in the conjuncture of those two movements, rather than in the theoretizing of any individual scholar, and most emphatically in the literature of contemporary Afro-American women who were able to be published as they had not been before, precisely because that conjuncture was occurring.
That the development of black feminist criticism(s) is firmly rooted in this conjecture is crystal clear from a pivotal essay of the 1970s: Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," which was originally published in Conditions II in 1977. By that time Smith was not only calling on critics to read, absorb, and pay attention to black women writers, as Washington had, but also to write about that body of literature from a feminist perspective. What feminist meant for Smith went beyond Washington's emphasis on image making. Critics, she believed, needed to demonstrate how the literature exposed "the brutally complex systems of oppression"-that of sexism, racism, and economic exploitation which affected so gravely the experience and culture of black women. As important, Smith was among the first to point out that black lesbian literature was thoroughly ignored in critical journals, an indication of the homophobia existent in the literary world.
Because the U.S. women's movement had begun to extend itself into academic arenas and because women's voices had been so thoroughly suppressed, by the middle seventies there was a visible increase of interest among academics in women's literature. Yet despite the existence of powerful contemporary Afro-American women writers who continued to be major explorers of Afro-American women's lives-writers such as Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Walker, Sherley Anne Williams (the list could be much longer)-little commentary on their works could be found in feminist journals. In many ways, they continued to be characterized by such journals as black, not women, writers. Nor, generally speaking, were critics who studied these writers considered either in the Afro-American or feminist literary worlds-far less the mainstream literary establishment-to be working on an important body of literature central to American letters. By 1977, Smith knew that the sexism of Afro-American literary/intellectual circles and the racism of white feminist literary journals resulted in a kind of homelessness for critical works on black women or other third world women writers. She underlined this fact in her landmark essay: "I think of the thousands and thousands of books which have been devoted by this time to the subject of Women's Writing and I am filled with rage at the fraction of these pages that mention black and other Third World women. I finally do not know how to begin, because in 1977 I want to be writing this for a black feminist publication."
At that time, most feminist journals were practically all-white publications; their content dealt almost exclusively with white women as if they were the only women in the United States. The extent to which the mid-twentieth-century women's movement was becoming, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, infected by racism seemed all too clear, and the split between a black and a white women's movement that occurred in the nineteenth century seemed to be repeating itself.
Smith seemed to believe that the lack of inclusion of women-of-color writers and critics in the burgeoning literature on women's voices was due, in part, to "the fact that a parallel black feminist movement had been slower in evolving," and that that fact "could not help but have impact upon the situation of black women writers and artists and explains in part why during that very same period we have been so ignored." My experience, however, suggests that other factors were more prominently at work, factors Smith also mentioned. In calling for a "body of black feminist political theory," she pointed out that such a theory was necessary since those who had access to critical publications-white male and, increasingly, black male and white female critics-apparently did not know how to respond to the works of black women. More accurately, I think these critics might have been resistant to this body of writing which unavoidably demonstrated the intersections of sexism and racism so central to Afro-American women's lives and therefore threatened not only white men's view of themselves, but black men and white women's view of themselves as well. Smith concludes that "undoubtedly there are other [black] women working and writing whom I do not know, simply because there is no place to read them."
I can personally attest to that fact. By 1977 I was well into the writing of the book that would become Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (1980) and had independently stumbled on two pivotal concepts that Smith articulated in her essay: "the need to demonstrate that black women's writing constituted an identifiable literary tradition" and the importance of looking "for precedents and insights in interpretation within the works of other black women." I found, however, that it was virtually impossible to locate either the works of many nineteenth-century writers or those of contemporary writers, whose books went in and out of print like ping-pong balls. For example, I xeroxed Brown Girl, Brownstones (please forgive me, Paule) any number of times because it simply was not available and I wanted to use it in the classes I had begun to teach on Afro-American women's literature. At times I felt more like a detective than a literary critic as I chased clues to find a book I knew existed but which I had begun to think I had hallucinated.
Particularly difficult, I felt, was the dearth of historical material on Afro-American women-that is, on the contexts within which the literature had evolved-contexts I increasingly saw as a necessary foundation for the development of a contemporary black feminist perspective. Other than Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White America (1973), I could not find a single full-length analysis of Afro-American women's history. And despite the proliferation of Afro-American and women's history books in the 1970s, I found in most of them only a few paragraphs devoted to black women, the favorites being Harriet Tubman in the black studies ones and Sojourner Truth in the women's studies ones. As a result, in preparation for my book, I, untrained in history, had created a patchwork quilt of historical facts gathered here and there. I remember being positively elated when Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's collection of historical essays-The Afro-American Woman (1978)-was published. But by then, I had almost completed my manuscript. If Afro-American women critics were to turn to black women of the past for insights, their words and works needed to be accessible and had to be located in a cogent historical analysis.
As well, what was stunning to me as I worked on Black Women Novelists was the resistance I experienced among scholars to my subject matter. Colleagues of mine, some of whom had my best interest at heart, warned me that I was going to ruin my academic career by studying an insignificant, some said nonexistent, body of literature. Yet I knew it was fortunate for me that I was situated in an Afro-American studies rather than in an English department, where not even the intercession of the Virgin would have allowed me to do research on black women writers. I also found that lit crit journals were not interested in the essays I had begun to write on black women writers. The sustenance I received during those years of writing Black Women Novelists came not from the academic/literary world but from small groups of women in bookstores, Y's, in my classes and writers groups for whom this literature was not so much an object of study but was, as it is for me, life-saving.
Many contemporary Afro-American critics imply in their analyses that only those Afro-Americans in the academy-college faculty and students-read Afro-American literature. I have found quite the opposite to be true. For it was "ordinary" black women, women in the churches, private reading groups, women like my hairdresser and her clients, secondary school teachers, typists, my women friends, many of whom were single mothers, who discussed The Bluest Eye (1970) or In Love and Trouble (1973) with an intensity unheard of in the academic world. In fact most of my colleagues did not even know these books existed when women I knew were calling these writers by their first name-Alice, Paule, Toni, June-indicating their sense of an intimacy with them. They did not necessarily buy the books but often begged, "borrowed," or "liberated" them-so that book sales were not always indicative of their interest. I had had similar experiences during the 1960s. Postal clerks, winos, as well as the folk who hung out in Micheaux's, the black bookstore in Harlem, knew Baldwin's, Wright's, Ellison's works and talked vociferously about them when many of the folk at CCNY and Columbia had never read one of these writers. Ralph Ellison wrote an extremely provocative blurb for Our Nig when he pointed out that Harriet Wilson's novel demonstrated that there is more "free-floating" literacy among blacks than we acknowledge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 by Barbara Christian Copyright © 2007 by Najuma Henderson. Excerpted by permission.
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