Race, Black Women Writing, and Gwendolyn Brooks

Abstract

Abstract “Most of what passes for culture and thought on the North American continent” has enforced the nonexistence of black women, write Gloria Hull and Barbara Smith in the introduction to their important anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (xvii). For black women writers, the marketplace economics of last hired, first fired has translated into a literary economics of exclusion and absence. From such early works of feminist literary criticism as Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination and Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers in the mid-seventies to recent works such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, the writings of women of color have been given little or no place in white feminist revivals, revisions, and re-readings of women’s literary history. Women of color are subsumed within the category “Woman,” and the writings of predominantly white middle-class women are generalized and universalized into the female imagination, the literary woman, and the female literary tradition. In response to the invisibility of black women in white male and female literary criticism as well as in black male criticism, black feminist critics have called for a black feminist critical perspective that would be fully cognizant of the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender in the lives and writings of black women.