Introduction to Focus: "This Instant and This Triumph": Women of Color Publishing

Abstract

Page 4 American Book Review “This Instant and This Triumph”: Women of Color Publishing Introduction to Focus: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Focus Editor Women of color in the US have been using the printed word as a medium for imagination and protest for more than a century. In the 1800s, novelist Pauline Hopkins was a co-founder of the collective Colored American Magazine, where she published short stories and serial novels that imagined the equality of the races as a rational and achievable future.Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells co-founded her own newspaper, and when her offices were burned to the ground, she rallied black women and raised the funds to publish pamphlets on lynching and racist mob rule in theAmerican South. In the mid-twentieth century, Chicana feminists in the US invoked the memory of Las Hijas de Cuahtemoc, women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, as they created a network of campus-based newspapers and anthologies through which to theorize the relevance and contours of Chicana feminism. In the early 1980s, a group of women including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde (from whose “Litany for Survival” the title of this piece comes), and Cherríe Moraga came together to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) and kept This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1983) in print for more than a decade. Though women of color sustained publishing initiatives before and throughout the twentieth century , the very act of what this section calls “Women of Color Publishing” is embattled and almost counter-intuitive. The dominant narratives of state policy and the cherished “great work” of American literature have not characterized women of color as intellectuals or important cultural producers. Instead, women of color have been caricaturized as reproducers of domestic stability in the homes of the literarily relevant, and deviant reproducers of pathological cultures of poverty at worst. And further, as the selfproclaimed “third world feminists” in the US asserted in the 1980s, neither the seeming refuges of feminist publishing or third-world publishing supported the critical voices of women of color. Women of color producing literary texts (or anything else) on their own terms smacks of danger. In the 1970s when eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison used her tokenized role within a mainstream publishing house to encourage the work of black women writers such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, their work was met with an intense critical backlash from black male critics who attacked , not the literary merit of Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) or Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975), but rather the supposedly “divisive” audacity of the authors in representing and responding to rape and domestic violence against women in their texts. Morrison and other black women writers working in that time period, including Walker, Shange, June Jordan, VèVè Clark, and others, realized that autonomous publishing was the only way to create space for their voices. In a collective called “The Sisterhood,” these women envisioned a publishing company called Kizzy Enterprises that would have operated out of Shange’s house, funded on a profitless basis and through which they intended to keep texts that they deemed crucial in print and available. When Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa brought together writings by radical women of color to protest the abusive tokenization of women of color in the mainstream feminist movement and to create a viable network for women of color, the feminist publisher Persephone Press was not willing or able color presses in this moment reaches beyond the publication of women of color by women of color for women of color; this section features work that ranges from essays, critical analysis, poetry, fiction, interactive art and work authored by multi-racial groups of women, women of color collectives, men of color, and like-minded people of many genders and backgrounds. However, these works are far from generalist, and each creates an intimate relationship that assumes the participation of readers in a shared project of transformation. RedBone Press Lisa Moore founded RedBone Press after successfully publishing the groundbreaking anthology Does...