Contemporary African American women writers

Abstract

Contemporary African American women writers are perhaps best characterized as diverse. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) to Rita Dove's award-winning collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah (1986), to Suzan-Lori Parks's experimental drama, Topdog/Underdog (2001), full circle, back to Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), contemporary African American literature by African American women writers offers full expressions of the complexity of contemporary African American life, particularly as this life relates to the black woman. Setting the tone for the literature to come and its corresponding social critique was Toni Cade [Bambara]'s all important, simply yet magically titled The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). As she concedes that the work she wanted to do in the anthology was “overly ambitious” from the beginning, a “lifetime's work,” she is clear about what the text does achieve: “This then is a beginning - a collection of poems, stories, essays, formal, informal, reminiscent, that seem best to reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary Black woman in this country.” As Eleanor W. Traylor notes in her introduction to the 2005 reprinting of the text, The Black Woman “explores first the interiority of an in-the-head, in-the-heart, in-the-gut region of a discovery called the self . It tests the desires, the longings, the aspirations of this discovered self with and against its possibilities for respect, growth, fulfillment, and accomplishment.” As accurately as Traylor describes the anthology specifically here, her statements also describe, more generally, the literature of contemporary African American women writers - literature which explores the self , its desires, its longing, its aspirations, and its possibilities, particularly in the post-civil rights United States.