African American Intellectuals Symposium

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When I was invited present this symposium I accepted with great enthusiasm for occasions when we can gather together as feminist critics and engage with the work of black female intellectuals as the main focus of our attention, celebrate one of our own as it were, have been few and far between. In particular, the chance publicly engage and celebrate the work of Claudia Tate was particularly attractive me. Claudia's contributions literary and cultural criticism have been important and original in so many public ways, but I also want signal at the outset that her intellectual presence in the academy is also of personal significance me. The body of Claudia's work is so substantial, conceptually complex and varied, that when I sat down write, my excitement vanished and was replaced by anxiety. If I had twenty minutes, which essays or books, or issues, or themes should I, or could I select? Claudia brought an understanding of the working lives of black women writers my desk and into my consciousness: she made me stop short and ask myself why I had avoided or neglected discuss, in my own writing, the crucially important issues of narrative pleasure and desire; and she made me realize how careless my own readings were when I found the novels of black women in the post-Reconstruction period opaque, opaque, that is, when I was not finding them downright indigestible. I remember my first encounter with this statement: For a decade black women writers of the post-Reconstruction era reaffirmed in novels their belief that virtuous women like themselves could reform society by domesticating Claudia's argument in Domestic Allegories of Po litical Desire was a revelation and a gift, and it helped me read differently. Claudia is also a non-conformist and I have always identified with and taken great pleasure in her acts of critical rebellion, which are numerous. She breaks down barriers of critical parochialism and safety, challenges the limits of conventional paradigms, and refuses bend beneath the sibboleths of the field. In fact, Claudia is a perfect fit for my favorite split infinitive, to boldly go where no woman has gone before. First, she has been an intellectual leader in the detailed excavation of texts that have been too long ignored by the American critical establishment. Ignored is a very polite way of putting it. While canons of African American fiction have been slowly and methodically built, Claudia's cannons have been wheeled into the arena, fused and discharged. After the dust has cleared we have all been able see that these traditions were built by denying the validity of the texts which did not fit the paradigm being used. Claudia has been irresistibly drawn, it seems, the texts that no one wa nts talk about. A tenacious and meticulous researcher, in addition being an innovative close reader, she is also something of a magician. We think the swords drawn through the box on stage are going draw blood but she inevitably shows us that there is nothing fear from, but much learn by, confronting post-Reconstruction fiction, W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee or Richard Wright's Savage Holiday, for example. I have also felt from the earliest of Claudia's essays that we shared a mission, that we both were desperate de-parochialize departments of English and destroy, forever, the narrow ethnic definitions within which traditions of English literature have been reproduced in the academy. In this task, as in all her work, Claudia has always refused reductive visions, seeking instead articulate the complexly different black voices that speak a general or universal human condition. The interaction of race and gender in the work of black women is for Claudia a site of an increased breadth of vision rather than a cause of narrowing our focus, as many English department critics mistakenly claim. …