Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison. By Kelly Lynch Reames

Abstract

A challenge rang out from the back of Beveridge Hall, during the opening keynote address at the University of London-sponsored conference, At the Millennium: Interrogating Gender, on 9 January 1998. The keynote speaker was Elaine Showalter. The challenge concerned not only Showalter's proposed celebration of “the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power,” but also the complete exclusion of black women from Showalter's elaboration of three paradigms of the female intellectual: the Cassandra, the feminist Messiah, and the Dark Lady—criticism that Showalter chose not to incorporate into the subsequently published version of her paper in Women: A Cultural Review. However, an altogether different challenge, waged against white, feminist critics and theorists through the 1990s, concerned not oversights and exclusions but appropriation. Hence, an apparently more contentious 1992 conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz, focused on “Psychoanalysis in African American Contexts: Feminist Reconfigurations,” produced the fascinating volume, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Among various thorny issues with which this collection grapples, the appropriation of African American women's creative writing by white feminist critics is criticized by contributors such as Ann duCille.