Black women’s feminist literary renaissance of the late twentieth century

Abstract

Although Black women have been writing literature and creating texts (songs, oral narrative, sermons, etc.) since the arrival of Africans in the new world, with few exceptions, access to publication and inclusion in literary canons for centuries remained nearly impossible. In the wake of the civil rights and Black feminist movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the United States, African American women feminist writers were agents in defining, producing, and publishing a body of literature that came to be known as the Black feminist literary renaissance. During a span of approximately 25 years, Black women writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and others gained access to publication and created a literary revolution grounded in the framing and articulation of a Black female subjective self. This literary renaissance led to transformations in high school and undergraduate curricula, in literary criticism, in major literary awards, and in literary canons. Central to this transformation is the work of Toni Morrison, not only in her unprecedented literary production but especially as a consequence of her work from 1965 until 1983 as a literary mentor and editor at Random House.