Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's NovelsCourtneyThorsson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Abstract

Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels Courtney Thorsson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.Courtney Thorsson makes bold arguments and examines texts by foundational twentieth century African American women authors in Women's Work. Authors Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison utilize their novels to narrate a (5), and Thorsson emphasizes the public and private work of Black women within the novels and their efforts to identify women's work rich terrain for literary negotiations of raced, gendered, individual, and communal identities (7). Women's work is multivalent, yet Thorsson is specifically concerned with organizing, cooking, mapping, dancing, and inscribing, for these forms relate to the construction of histories, identities, and nations for the Black women in each novel.Thorsson argues that Bambara, in The Salt Eaters, establishes Velma as a character who struggles to organize her inner, physical, and emotional nation while her recovery (after a suicide attempt) determines the well-being of the outer nation of those around her. Bambara describes notions of healing fractured selves, coalitions, and communities through organizing. Analyzing Ntozke Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Thorsson addresses Shange's use of recipes and cooking as acts of cultural nationalism in the crafting, recording, and transporting of foodways and practices across communities. Shange illuminates the importance of cooking and food preparation with the characters Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, for the value of the recipe is that it renders the labor of cooking (planning, shopping, measuring, sifting, mixing, baking, serving, and so on) entirely visible and largely transparent (77). Just as food travels and creates cultural nationalism in Shange's work, Thorsson identifies dancing as a form of important women's work and nation-building in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. The author details the various diasporic dances illustrated by Marshall, for each carries significance in building and dancing a nation. Through the travels of protagonist Avey, readers come to understand that dances of individuals and groups signify collective pasts, memories, experiences, and agency. Past experiences and memories open Naylor's Mama Day in the form of an island map, a matrilineal family tree, and a bill of sale for the distant enslaved matriarch of the Day family. Thorsson examines mapping in Naylor's work as a method of cultural nationalism in that Willow Springs is a cultural and geographical nation of its own because the island does not belong to any particular nation, yet has been influenced by the cultures and peoples of the US, Caribbean, and West Africa. …