African American Feminist Research Articles

Re-Visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists

Re-Visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists

Festival, Anti Festival, Counter Festival, Non-Festival

colleague recently reported on a study she read which indicated that people who spend at least an hour per day alone were more productive both personally and professionally than those constantly in the presence of others. I surmise that this fact might puzzle the former colleagues with whom I worked as Dean of Residence at a small college of the University of Waterloo in the late 1980s. At our annual retreat for residence assistants, a substantial portion of the workshop activity involved discussing the possibility of suicide among young people away from home for the first time, and perpetually stressed by the requirement for high achievement in University. The message sent by the counsellors and Christian ministers who directed our sessions was that the residence assistant's job was to keep the women and men who lived on their floors busy and sociable with others. We should worry, we were told, about people who spent time alone in their rooms. When I countered that I should personally worry about people who never spent time alone in their rooms, who avoided opportunities for reflection and contemplation, my comments were met first with blank looks of confusion and then with vigorous repudiation. It was clear that for this bouncy, outgoing lot of undergraduate residence assistants -- as well as for the professionals who guided their work -- the very concept of wanting to be alone indicated pathology. In the residence, we were fortunate not to have any suicides during my Deanship, and I do not know if in fact the residence assistants, busy with their own work, actually managed to prevent any solitary activities. But the inscription of this process reminded me that the panopticon so tellingly theorised by Michel Foucault (1977) lives in many institutions -- not just the prison. Perhaps the obsession with students maintaining constant sociability is not truly about personal mental health. Maybe it is more about the question of what people might be getting up to behind those closed doors, away from the gaze and surveillance of others. Not only suicide, but other heinous sins of contemporary Euro North American society -- drug-taking, alcoholism (someone who drinks alone is almost definitionally alcoholic), masturbation -- can be solitary practices. Surely, mainstream culture contends, a healthy person would not pursue such behaviours. Sociable is good; solitary is bad. Sociability and collective activity have become so focal for Euro North Americans that they have even built academic disciplinary definitions and practices upon it. Introductory anthropology texts assert, for example, that culture is A shared way of life that includes material products, values, beliefs, and norms that are transmitted within a particular society from to generation (Scupin and Decorse 2001: 599).(2) itself is often defined in material terms, as in Folklore texts have come to be seen not simply as realizations of a normative standard, but as emergent, the product of the complex interplay of communicative resources, social goals, individual competence, ground rules for performance, and culturally defined event structures (Bauman 1992: 33). It's only recently that ethnologists, anthropologists, and folklorists have begun to conceive of culture as something that exists in the mind, beyond material and social practices. Notions like Benedict Anderson's imagined community (1991) have a potential to fundamentally alter the ways our disciplines of folklore, anthropology, and ethnology think culture. Not surprisingly, many new ideas come not from within anthropology and folkloristics, nor even from the mainstream of feminist theorising, but instead from individuals whose marginalisation makes their situated knowledges and partial perspectives (Haraway 1988) particularly acute. Queer theory's notion of sex and sexuality as performative (Butler 1990) but also as intrinsically and analytically central (Doty 1993), and African-American feminist concepts that silence can mean resistence, not only acquiescence (bell hooks 1990), or that freedom of the mind could be useful to liberation (Collins 1990), provide examples of such insights. …

Interracial Dating: The Implications of Race for Initiating a Romantic Relationship

Currently, limited research exists that explores the socially taboo topic of interracial dating between African Americans and European Americans. Historically, African Americans and European Americans have had a highly destructive relationship of enslavement and oppression, which has resulted in a history of mistrust, according to P. H. Collins (African American Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, New York, Routledge, 1990). As a result, this relationship symbolizes the institutionalized oppression embedded in race relations despite the very intimate nature of this romantic relationship. Using the centrality of race within the context of romantic relationships, this study was designed to determine how race influences the communicative process. Q-sort methodology was used, which required participants to determine what waiting, hinting, direct, and third-party intervention strategies they would use to initiate a date in both same-race and interracial contexts. Findings reveal that when comparing verbal strategies across both contexts and open-ended responses to likelihood or reality of dating interracially, participants were resistant to the idea of dating a person from another race. External factors such as family and society were cited as primary deterrents to involvement in an interracial romantic relationship. In general, participants in this study used more social distancing strategies for initiating interracial dating relationships than same-race dating relationships.

"As with Words of Fire": Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist Discourse

Previous articleNext article No Access"As with Words of Fire": Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist DiscourseJuanita KarpfJuanita Karpf Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 24, Number 3Spring, 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495367 Views: 17Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:LUCY CAPLAN “Strange What Cosmopolites Music Makes of Us”: Classical Music, the Black Press, and Nora Douglas Holt's Black Feminist Audiotopia, Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no.33 (Aug 2020): 308–336.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196320000218Daniel Cavicchi Foundational Discourses of Fandom, (Mar 2018): 27–46.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119237211.ch2DAVID GOODMAN “On Fire with Hope”: African American Classical Musicians, Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour , and the Hope for a Colour-Blind Radio, Journal of American Studies 47, no.22 (Nov 2012): 475–494.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875812001387Juanita Karpf The Possibility of Theomusicology: William Bradbury’s Esther, the Beautiful Queen, Religion and the Arts 16, no.1-21-2 (Jan 2012): 1–28.https://doi.org/10.1163/156852912X615865

Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties.

From the early days of second-wave feminism, motherhood and the quest for women's liberation have been inextricably linked. And yet motherhood has at times been viewed, by anti-feminists and select feminists alike, as somehow at odds with feminism. In reality, feminists have long treated motherhood as an organizing metaphor for women's needs and advancement. The mother has been regarded with suspicion at times, deified at others, but never ignored. The first book devoted to this complex relationship, Motherhood Reconceived examines in depth how the realities of motherhood have influenced feminist thought. Bringing to life the work of a variety of feminist writers and theorists, among them Jane Alpert, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, Umansky situates feminist discourses of motherhood within the social and political contexts of the 1960s. Charting an increasingly favorable view of motherhood among feminists from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Umansky reveals how African American feminists sought to redefine black nationalist discourses of motherhood, a reworking subsequently adopted by white radical and socialist feminists seeking to broaden the racial base of their movement. Noting the cultural left's conflicted relationship to feminism, that is, the concurrent demand for individual sexual liberation and the desire for community, Umansky traces that legacy through various stages of feminist concern about motherhood: early critiques of the nuclear family, tempered by strong support for day care; an endorsement of natural childbirth by the women's health movement of the early 1970s; white feminists' attempt to forge a multiracial movement by declaring motherhood a universal bond; and the emergence of psychoanalytic feminism, ecofeminism, spiritual feminism, and the feminist anti- pornography movement.

Writing/Reading Selves, Writing/Reading Race

For several years now, feminist theory and philosophy have been faced with criticisms from African American feminists for not taking race sufficiently into account in discussions of women's issues. This criticism was embroiled in the recent controversies over essentialism in feminist theory. A number of feminist theorists have acknowledged the validity of this criticism and several of those most important to continental thought have given race more attention in their most recent work. Elisabeth Grosz acknowledges that bodies are raced as well as gendered and sexed (Volatile Bodies). Kelly Oliver cites bell hooks as an ally in claiming that the term "woman" (and the idea of sexual difference) needs to be kept in play for the sake of feminism. Oliver argues that dropping "woman" in favor of a generalized humanity would only benefit women whose male counterparts are at the top of the heap; that is, white men (Womanizing Nietzsche). Drucilla Cornell devotes several pages to an analysis of the interaction of race, gender, and sexual desire manifested in a disturbing incident in her own life (Transformations). Three essays in Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter focus on those charged intersections in literary and film settings. Butler and Cornell, no doubt because they give race the most attention, even go as far as to say that it is impossible to understand gender without interrogating race. All these theorists realize that the fact of racial difference poses some fundamental challenges to the way feminism construes its subject. They acknowledge that multiple factors go into the production of any particular woman and argue for the need to think "woman" as multiple. Feminist theory seems to be moving toward what Rosi Braidotti calls the nomadic subject; a subject theorized as constituted by a shifting set of differences (The Nomadic Subject). However, white feminist theory has yet to develop a sustained discussion of race, especially as a factor of white women's subjectivity. Race only becomes an issue when feminist theory confronts the other of its same; that is, when the race of the other woman is in question. Whiteness becomes visible only against the screen of other women's blackness and then disappears. Why is it so difficult for white feminist theory to keep race in view? Tina Chanter argues that Irigaray's analysis shows that sexual difference is to feminism what Heidegger argues that Being is to metaphysics: the assumed foundation of its project whose meaning has yet to be thought out (Ethics of Eros). I would argue that the difference race makes to gender occupies an analogous position in white feminist thought. It is as though the fact of its difference-ing is too obvious to require analysis, on the one hand, and perhaps too threatening to white feminism on the other. For this reason, I am concerned that moving too quickly to an abstractly multiple "woman" will not satisfactorily dislodge feminist theory's dominance by white solipsism. On the other hand, I think a sustained interrogation into the difference race makes to what it means to be a woman would move white feminist theory's subject toward a more genuine and concrete multiplicity. I want to experiment with making the whiteness of feminism's "woman" more visible as a racial mark through a reading of two autobiographical texts, one by African American feminist legal theorist Patricia Williams (Alchemy of Race and Rights) and one by white Radical Lesbian feminist Mary Daly (Outercourse). Turning to autobiography rather than to white feminist theoretical texts might seem an unnecessary detour if my aim is to take white feminist theory beyond the current impasse. However, I would argue that autobiographical texts especially these two texts offer unique resources for the project I am proposing. In "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex," Judith Butler argues that identifications are multiple and contestatory; that is, they are "in-corporations" of negotiations with multiple "vectors of power" that include sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc. …

Leading with her Life: An African American Feminist (Re)Interpretation of Leadership for an Urban High School Principal

What is the relationship between the meanings of personal and professional acts of leading, the creation of a school culture that honors diversity, and what we know about effective schools? This case study of an African American female urban school principal explores and reinterprets traditional conceptualizations of effective leadership, given the increasing diversity of today's schools.

Uses for a Dead White Male: Shakespeare, Feminism, and Diversity

This article and the two following were prepared as complementary contributions to a panel of the American Association for Higher Education conference on ‘Theatre and Cultural Pluralism’, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1992. In the first, Kim F. Hall, from the Department of English at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, describes her experiences as an African American feminist teaching Shakespeare – often against the expectations of students who expect either an affirmation of his supposed universality, a simplistic condemnation of his politically incorrect positions on race and gender – or his appropriation, on behalf of those wishing to stake their own claim to the ‘culture of power’ he is taken to represent. Instead, Kim F. Hall proposes that feminism offers ‘one way of helping students look at Shakespeare ‘multiculturally’, since gender is one area of inquiry that both crosses cultures and forces one to think about the differences between cultures’.

Towards the Poetization of the "Field of Manners"

In awarding 1993 Nobel Prize for literature African American novelist Toni Morrison, Swedish Academy called Morrison literary artist of first rank whose work is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at same time rich variation. The Academy statement then applauded Morrison's linguistic achievement by proclaiming that writer delves into language itself, a language she wants liberate from fetters of race. As Paul Gray correctly observes, Academy made an honorable choice Morrison, but for at least one wrong reason. Her purpose, Gray notes, is the blackness of her characters and bestow them an abstract that can understand. It is, instead, insist upon particular racial identities of her fictional people - black women and men under stresses peculiar them and their station U.S. - and to break through limitations and prejudices of those lucky enough read her fiction (Gray 87). Indeed, what is so problematic about Swedish Academy's statement is that search for abstract universalities only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls of essential. Williams posits that traditional notion of typicality literature is in effect a rendering of 'universals,' those characteristics which purport be permanently important elements of human nature and human condition (101). The problem with upholding traditional definition of typicality, Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, seeking out permanent elements of human social situation, gravitate toward not only recognition of essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability (102). African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees problem of the rhetoric of universality be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including African American voice, Henderson would prefer the privileging of difference, or multiplicity of 'interested readings,' order resist the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present. Henderson remains concerned that the rhetoric of . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from dominant literary-critical discourse as well as socio-political centers of power, and she observes that the reduction of multiplicity undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists speak for all women, black men speak for all blacks, and white males speak for everyone (156).(2) Indeed, contrary what is suggested Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, best writings African American literature are those that use languages that transcend African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls huge silences literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined (M. Brown 6A). The best writings African American literature challenge cultural, political, and social configuration of literary voice America with their insistence on celebrating African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from New York Times, My world did shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.(3) To understand ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, reappropriate our understanding of dialectical relationship between specificity and and between marginality and centralization; appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is understand importance for African Americans achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr. …

‘Race’ and Sexuality: Challenging the Patriarchal Structuring of Urban Social Space

The topic of patriarchy has received little direct attention by geographers but it is addressed in this paper as a central tenet of the structuring of urban social space. Drawing on an outline of the various ways in which the city has been treated as a site embodying patriarchal principles, the author teases out the heterosexist and white cultural constructions that permeate our treatment of patriarchy, A call is made for explicit attention to be paid to constructions of sexuality and “race”. The contributions to these topics by lesbian feminists and black and African-American feminists are drawn into a framework for a reinvigorated conceptualization of patriarchy. Two aspects of empirical work carried out in Grand Rapids, MI, in 1989 are analyzed in relation to this framework, namely living arrangements among low-income Anglo-American and African-American women and the creation of a lesbian residential area. The paper concludes with an assessment of the extent to which our constructions of “race”, gender, and sexuality help us understand whether empirical changes in the social and spatial constitution of households are challenging the patriarchal structuring of urban social space.

Borderlands in the Classroom

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS MULTICULTURALISM HAS BEEN A HEATED TOPIC of debate in the mass media, government agencies, and academic conferences, as politicians, pundits, and scholars have come together to argue over the definition of what constitutes America. Less prominent has been a vision of how multiculturalism actually works in the classroom. What follows is a personal narrative of a classroom experience I had teaching a literature course in the spring of 1990. It leads to a series of reflections which branch out in two different, but related, directions. The first direction demonstrates the ways in which a multicultural curriculum has led my students to reassess their sense of self and of society reconstituted as borderlands; the second and more self-reflective direction points to the ways in which my own pedagogical choices and methods contain built-in assumptions about multiculturalism of which I (an African-American feminist) am sometimes, but not always, conscious and which affect my students' reactions to their readings. My hope is that such a personal narrative might provide an opening onto a consideration of certain theoretical issues in multiculturalism that might reveal both some of the strengths and the blind spots of its practitioners. In the spring of 1990, I created and taught a senior seminar, entitled American Women Writers and Modernism, in the University of Maryland's English Department. The class consisted of approximately eighteen white women students. Our point of departure was to rethink the traditional

He Speaks for Whom?: Inscription and Reinscription of Women in Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters

1 What happens to second sex in a novel as powerful as Ellison's Invisible Man where the trope of invisibility functions as a critique of racist American society? When the text itself perpetuates the invisibility it seeks to undo, it seems inevitable it will invite response and revision. In Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters we can discern an argument, not with Ellison's manifest text of invisibility and blackness of blackness, but with the subtext of gender erasure. African American feminist critics have, especially in the last fifteen or twenty years, articulated the problematic of double invisibility, the double jeopardy results from being both black and female. They have sought to add gender to DuBois's well known analysis of the sense of double -- consciousness with which many African Americans live (3). Bell Hooks claims no other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black (7). It is not simply race, gender and class compound oppression arithmetically, to cite Valerie Smith (who borrows from Barbara Smith), but issues of class and alter one's experience of gender, just as gender alters one's experience of class and race (Loopholes 225). Much work in black feminist theory and criticism has taken as its subject the construction and/or erasure of African American women, and especially how the combined categories of race, class, and gender intensify and illuminate in important ways both reading and writing, believing that the meaning of blackness in this country shapes profoundly the experience of gender, just as the conditions of womanhood affect ineluctably the experience of race (Smith, Black Feminist Theory 47). Many novels written by black women since the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man have (among other things) filled in gaps or given voice to the silences have kept black women invisible. Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters is one such novel. Published in 1980, twenty-eight years after Ellison's Invisible Man, after the turbulent sixties and some gains had been made by the Civil Rights Movement, The Salt Eaters moves beyond its own created world, engaging other texts like Invisible Man in a dialogic relationship. Henry Louis Gates explains the phenomenon thus: Literary works are in dialogue not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of or gender, but because writers read other writers and ground their representations of experience in models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin. (7) Gates is speaking here of the construction of a tradition of black women writers, but this phenomenon/strategy is similar even when the writers do not, perhaps, feel such kinship. Invisible Man itself is peopled with the discourse of Anglo-American male writers from Jefferson and Whitman to Faulkner and Hemingway, providing a twentieth-century Western gloss in the use of Freudian, Marxist, and existentialist notions of self (Byerman 11). Ellison brings the language, imagery, and symbols of these writers and works into his text, and by placing them in an entirely new context, he changes the joke and slips the yoke, or rather reverses, revises, or augments the writing and thinking of these men in ways Russian Formalists would have called defamiliarization. Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay, as Technique, explains: After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it -- hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. (13) If the object in question happens to be another work of art, a literary text, for example -- a Whitman poem or the Declaration of Independence -- the estrangement or defamiliarization occurs when work is pulled into an unfamiliar context, such as a novel about the impossibility of freedom and body electric for a man who is socially and culturally invisible. …

Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire

Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire

When print alone fails poetry: Performance as a contingency of literary value

Poetry holds educative and experiential power for those beyond the academic elite, particularly in the case of poems with strong audience appeal, poems whose values are often as much contingent upon speech and performance as they are on print. The hegemony of print in our culture, however, has led us to devalue such poems, threatening their survival unless poets, editors, teachers, and performers make conscious efforts culturally to reproduce such works. In order to articulate a methodology for identifying poems that print alone does not serve well, this essay culls features from three twentieth‐century literary traditions that have worked against the limiting and limited power of print: African American poetics, Beat poetics, and Feminist poetics. Beyond identifying such poems, editors, producers, and teachers can make various kinds of efforts to bring these poems and performances of them into the orbit of attention of our students.

Pioneers of the African-American Feminist Tradition

Pioneers of the African-American Feminist Tradition

The First Negro Churches in the District of Columbia

Previous articleNext article FreeThe First Negro Churches in the District of ColumbiaJohn W. CromwellJohn W. Cromwell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 7, Number 1January 1922 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2713580 Views: 73 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1922, 1950, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Juanita Karpf "As with Words of Fire": Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist Discourse, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no.33 (Oct 2015): 603–632.https://doi.org/10.1086/495367

History of the High School for Negroes in Washington

Previous articleNext article FreeHistory of the High School for Negroes in WashingtonMary Church TerrellMary Church Terrell Search for more articles by this author PDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 2, Number 3July 1917 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2713767 Views: 95 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1917, 1945, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and History Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Juanita Karpf "As with Words of Fire": Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist Discourse, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24, no.33 (Oct 2015): 603–632.https://doi.org/10.1086/495367