African American Women's Literature Research Articles

The Anti-idealist Black Feminism of The Other Side of Terror

The Anti-idealist Black Feminism of The Other Side of Terror Roderick A. Ferguson (bio) Erica R. Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire, New York: NYU Press, 2021 Erica Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire is a book that provides a necessary interpretation of African American women's literature within the context of twentieth-century U.S. imperial ventures. If it just did that, that would be enough. In providing this interpretation, it has helped us understand the impressions that war and conflict have had on African American cultural production and how some of its most celebrated producers—Black feminists—have responded powerfully to the imprint of state violence. As important as that intervention is, the book does even more. It uses the long war on terror to initiate a critique of the worrisome idealisms that currently constitute many of the conversations around Blackness, idealisms that conceal Blackness's relations with what Edwards calls "imperial grammars" and "the scenes of incorporation," relations that align Blackness with imperial violence and incorporate it into regimes of dominance. Situating her investigation in the span of time between the rise of U.S. counterinsurgency in the 1960s and the years of the Obama presidency, Edwards defines the "imperial grammars of Blackness" as "the codes of cultural production and public discourse in linking the rationalization of US imperial violence abroad to the US public sphere's manipulation and incorporation of Blackness as the sign of multicultural beneficence" (21). As such, the book theorizes Blackness as existing in a dialectical relationship with U.S. empire in that it has been both the critic and the supplicant of U.S. imperial formations. In this, the book rejects Blackness as an idealism that is always the antithesis of dominant forms of power. Instead, the book favors a historically and politically grounded engagement with [End Page 211] Blackness, determining its vulnerabilities to empire as well as its possibilities for anti-imperialist insurgency. The imperial grammar of Blackness has direct bearing on the institutions that constellate the book—literature, the university, Black studies, and Black feminism. Those institutions set the stage for Blackness's incorporation into and rebellion against empire. About the scenes of incorporation, she writes the following: I wager, then, that the scenes of incorporation that tell the story of Black women's passing through the very fields through which I now pass—Black studies and literature in particular, universities and literary culture in general—might highlight a contradiction at the heart of contemporary Black (literary) studies, at the heart of English, at the heart of this book: that Blackness is as intimate with empire as the reader is with the book on-screen or on her lap, that the Black cultural text is, in other words, a transfer point, a too-short bridge, between the long war on terror's brutal practices of counterinsurgency and its smooth calls of advancement, inclusion, celebrity, and celebration. (188) The contradiction that she wrestles with in the book is the one that designates Black people, Black literary studies, Black feminism as entities simultaneously minoritized by the U.S. nation-state and activated by U.S. empire. For her, Black womanhood is not free of these contradictions. As she argues, "That Black women were both the targets of state defense initiatives and authors of a national narrative of democratic righteousness meant that they were positioned along the fault lines of competing nationalist discourses" (58). As Black women were occupying these fault lines, Black feminism developed practices to assess and confront those contradictions. This necessarily means that the book promotes and constructs a Black feminist archive that opposes the concealments of liberalism. Here, she points to the ways that liberal ideologies and apparatuses facilitate and obfuscate social violence by proclaiming the state's benevolence. As she says, "I will continue to call Black feminist literature—the work we might gather not as a collection of singular texts by great writers but rather under the banner of a collective project of marshaling the embodied practices of reading, writing, hearing and performing literature in the...

“Doomed by the Confusion in Their Design”: Racialized Urban Space, Redlining, and Monolithic Whiteness in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones

Abstract While Paule Marshall’s novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) has long been celebrated as a pivotal text in the canon of Caribbean American and African American women's literature, not enough attention has been paid to the material conditions underlying the coming-of-age story of her main protagonist, Selina Boyce. A close reading of the novel’s engagement with urban space—in particular with the changes that Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood undergoes in the late 1930s and early 1940s—reveals not only that the text contains an astute critique of American race formation at one of its most crucial moments, namely in the context of the New Deal’s policies of redlining and white flight, but also that Marshall ought to be considered as an early, but important, voice of both critical race theory and whiteness studies.

Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola

Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Like many other budding scholars and writers, I was a voracious reader prone to solitude and imagining "castles in the air" (117). It's no surprise that I would declare publicly that my favorite character from Louisa May Alcott's classic was Jo; however, in secret I also admired Amy's frank penchant for luxury and material comforts. I was never attracted to Meg's dutifulness or Beth's transcendent morality. Yet the scene I most remember is when the Moffats make over Meg into a "newly dressed doll" (76) in "borrowed plumes" (77) in chapter 9, "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair." As one of the few black girls in my private primary school, and later as the only black student in honors classes in my public high school, I knew what it was to constantly feel out of place, to be reminded subtly and overtly of your difference, and to want desperately to belong. That is why this scene at the "small party" (73), where, despite her desire to fit in, Meg has the "queer feeling" (77) of being made a spectacle, is memorable. It's where she and her sisters learn the importance of not judging yourself by the barometers of others but "to know and value the praise which is worth having" (83). Not until I was in graduate school at Cornell University in Lois Brown's class on nineteenth-century black women writers would the names of heroines from African American women's literature become as familiar to me as those from Little Women. The groundbreaking recovery work of Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Frances Foster, Claudia Tate, and others would exponentially widen my literary landscape. While the March sisters are bemoaning how "dreadful to be poor" and a "Christmas without any presents" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter "Christmas Festivities" describes enslaved women's attempts to "gladden the hearts of their little ones" despite the slave auction that presages "the Slaves' New Year's Day" (Jacobs 118, 15). Slowly, memorable exclamations like Amy's "Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty" (132) in response to Jo's sacrifice of her abundant chestnut hair to bring her father home from the Civil War hospital would be supplanted by Iola Leroy's declaration that she was "tried but not tempted" by white men's propositions (Harper 115). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. [End Page 99] In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on "little women" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as "Nig" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft). I'm glad that on its 150th anniversary Little Women can be read intertextually alongside new classics that portray the diversity and texture of what it meant to grow up female in a nation besieged by racial injustice and sexual predation, but with the grounded hope that like Marmee's daughters they would have the opportunity "to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected, to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send" (84). [End Page 100] Cherene Sherrard-Johnson University of Wisconsin–Madison Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

The Role of Literary Mentors in Writing Development: How African American Women's Literature Supported the Writings of Adolescent Girls

Coupling Royster's (2000) conceptual framework of zamani with Rosenblatt's (1978) reader response theory, the researcher explored the ways African American women's writings supported, nurtured, and “mentored” the writings of adolescent girls. Findings show that the mentor texts served to help the girls generate ideas for their writings, think about their identities, understand the structure and style of genres, and invoke a response from readers through the use of critical language. Understanding the purpose of literary mentors is useful for English educators in appreciating the varied utility of texts and how they can be used to advance the writings and identities of youth.

Frances Smith Foster: A Select Bibliography

In this final tribute, we offer a sampling of Frances Smith Foster's published work. Because the SSAWW Lifetime Achievement Medal recognizes the recipient's support of and impact upon the work of others as well as her own scholarly contributions, we have also included a short selection of volumes published by former students of Foster whose work she advised or supervised. BOOKS AUTHORED 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: A Guide for Instructors. New York: Norton, 1997. With Helen R. Houston. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979; znd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 1994. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. BOOKS EDITED Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies. New York: Feminist, 2010. Ed. with Stanlie M. James and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Love and Marriage in African America: An Anthology. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2007. La Familia en Africa y la Diaspora Africana: Estudio Multidisciplinar/Family in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Salamanca: Almar-Anglistica, 2004. Ed. with Olga Barrios. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1998; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2001. Ed. with Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American New York: Norton, 1997. Ed. with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al; 2nd ed., 2004; 3rd ed. in press. The Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W Harper. Boston: Beacon, 1994; 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1995. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist, 1990. ESSAYS Unraveling the Strands. Part of Hidden in Plain Sight: Colloquy with Annette Gordon-Reed on The Hemingses of Monticello. American Literature 47.2 (2012): 449-51. Anyway, We Certainly Don't Want to Be Lumped in with Black Studies!' True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 2011. 219-34. Genealogies of Our Concerns, (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times. American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 368-80. Looking Back Is Tricky Business ...) Narrative 18.1 (2010): 19-28. Mammy's Daughters; Or, the DNA of a Feminist Sexual Ethics. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Ed. Bernadette J. Brooten. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 267-86. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature. A Companion to African American Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 45-58. With Kim D. Green. Race and Literary Politics. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 316-27. With Cassandra Jackson. Early African American Women's Literature. The Cambridge Guide to African American Women's Ed. Angclyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009, 15-31. With LaRose Davis. Afterwords; Or, Whistling 'Dixie' on the Front Porch of My Southern Home. Southern Quarterly 45. …

On First Ladies and Passing at the Equator: Madame Sarkozy, Madame Michelle, Maman Chantal

On First Ladies and Passing at the Equator:Madame Sarkozy, Madame Michelle, Maman Chantal Marie Lathers (bio) "Bonjour!" The young man smiled full in my face as I moved toward the water. "Bonjour." I vaguely grinned back, sunspots bouncing off my retina. I waved to my daughter, Linden, who romped in the waves with Elvis and Geraldine, our Anglophone driver and cook who formed part of our Cameroonian family. A literature professor in the United States, I was on a Fulbright grant to teach in the French-speaking part of the country. It was October 2008, and we were on vacation at Seme Beach, in the South-West Province, Mile Eleven from the town of Limbe and mere hours from the equator. He paused; I wondered why. Was he one of the local men who frequented the hotel in search of middle-aged white women to wine, dine, and hand the check to? I had seen a few such couples, and I had seen their mirror images: young, beautiful black women with old white men clinging to them. In the hotel restaurant Geraldine had recognized one of her high school friends hanging onto a large white man: "Look what has become of her, Mum. She was always thinking she was special—but now she is not special at all." I scolded myself for being suspicious of his motive for greeting me, in a country where greetings were routine and where in one month men had treated me with more respect than I garnered in the United States over the course of a year. But he followed up with something that startled me. "Vous n'êtes pas Madame Sarkozy?" I hesitated and then giggled like a girl. "Non." As I walked on, my feet kicked up bits of black sand that stuck to the backs of my calves—residue of Mount Cameroon, the active volcano nearby. From behind I looked like a Dalmatian. I squinted at Linden, Elvis, and Geraldine as Elvis called out, "Mum, Mum, come in!" That was me, Mum. Not Madame Sarkozy—Mum. I'd heard of hard of hearing, but was this man hard of seeing? [End Page 53] Admittedly, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and I were both white, but in all other respects I was hardly her separated-at-birth twin. Where could a person be blinded enough, sun in his eyes or not, to take me, fifty-ish Mum, for the French president's main squeeze, the former fashion model, direct from Italy to the Champs-Elysées? Where but in the wake of Mount Cameroon, where equatorial rays intense enough to make anyone's sight falter beat down twelve hours out of every twenty-four. As it turned out, my moment as Mme. Sarkozy was just one of several moments I experienced during our year in Africa that jarred me into pondering the notion of identity and the possibility of being mistaken for, of "passing" as, another. This vacation anecdote, along with my wide-eyed ten-year-old's insights and my students' comments in the African American women's literature course I taught at the University of Dschang, brought a complexity to my understanding of racial passing, which, until then, had been unnuanced. The novels included on my syllabus, by Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, and others, provided narrative background and evidence for a reassessment, in part by suggesting that for women race and passing are entwined with gender and its markers, including age, clothing, and hair, as well as skin color. I also began to reconsider the ability of women to "pass" in light of my thoughts about the US presidential election, which took place while we lived in Cameroon. The election brought up the issue of first ladies, a category of women who are often made by the media and the public to pass as other than who they are. At Seme Beach Linden and I shared a room with Geraldine; Elvis bunked with our good friend Guy, who had helped us navigate through many surprises since our arrival six weeks previously in Yaoundé, the capital city. I was ready to teach, but faculty strikes had delayed the opening of universities. I had...

Review

A Black Daughter of the Revolution Frances Smith Foster Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. By Lois Brown. Chapel Hill: The University Press of North Carolina, 2008. xiv + 690 pp. I am a daughter of the Revolution, you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution but we are going to take that right. Pauline Hopkins, 1905 (qtd. in Brown 537) Therein lies the tale. If we recognize the name Pauline Hopkins, we know her as editor of the Colored American Magazine and author of Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughters, Winona, and Of One Blood. We would not be surprised, would generally expect, that her biographer would validate Hopkins's reputation for fierce insistence upon national citizenship and racial and gender equality by quoting or alluding to the titles of her best-known works. However, Lois Brown chose to title her densely researched epic Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and to build her reconstruction of this "fifth-generation New England writer, feminist, and public intellectual" with a self-definition, at an occasion, and on a site redolent with a legacy of freedom fighting and resistance (16). In so doing, Brown eschews the obvious characterization of a solitary, feisty female in favor of a scion and regional representative, an example and exemplar, a subject and a metaphor. In so doing, Brown manifests a central cause and effect of Hopkins's and other early African American women's lives and letters and becomes herself another "black [daughter] of the Revolution." Hopkins's and Brown's perspectives on and practices of life writing are characteristic of African American women's literature, especially that of the nineteenth century. They use words as weapons, practice art as activism, combine [End Page 433] personal narratives and political prognostications to test the abilities of language as testimony, testimony as witnessing, witnessing as influencing, impacting, and changing. To better understand and appreciate the contribution that Brown makes with her biography, we need to look back and to look around at what has been done in the African American autobiographical tradition and at what we need to do if we are to write honestly and effectively about it. Using writing as fighting is a tactic rife with complex and sometimes conflicting imperatives.1 Art enlisted for a cause must avoid the captivity of propaganda. Aesthetic activism requires and exploits subtle directness and wide-lens focus. It assumes naïve readers but needs readers who are experienced with word weaponry. Titles become forays. Seemingly simple or excessively detailed, they signify more than meets the eye. For example, in 1836, Jarena Lee's autobiography The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a coloured lady; giving an account of her call to preach the gospel indicates that Lee intends to record her personal material history but with a focus upon her spiritual development. Designating herself as "a coloured lady" invites comparison with Hopkins's "black daughters" not simply by calling attention to themselves as women of color but by their mufti that displays a status regularly denied women of African descent. Lee is a "lady." Hopkins is a "daughter." Like Hopkins, Lee not only confronts racism but sexism as well. Each writes as an infiltrator in male-dominated fields and claims a share of that territory for themselves and for other women. In 1846, one of Lee's fellow itinerant ministers and occasional traveling companions published Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Color: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America. This title not only reinforces the work of Lee but skirmishes with traditions that assumed women should not write histories. Reading Elaw's Memoirs comparatively with Lee's Life moves the characterization of these individual women as defiant, religious fundamentalists to members of a religious sisterhood, illuminates their literary kinship, and reveals signifying as more than a rhetorical technique in oral African America. Titles tell part of the tale. Some narrators also tended to acknowledge multiple motives. Elizabeth Keckley penned a similar palimpsest, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, she says...

Female genital mutilation in African and African American women's literature

The article builds on the existing dispute between African and African American women writers on the competence of writing about female genital mutilation (FGM), and tries to determine the existence and nature of the differences between the writings of these two groups. The author uses comparative analysis of two popular African and African American novels, comparing their ways of describing FGM, its causes and consequences, the level ob objectivity and the style of the narrations.This is followed by a discussion on the reasons for such differences, incorporating a larger circle of both African and African American women authors, at the same time analysing the deviance within the two groups. While the differences between African American writers are not that great, as they mostly fail to present the issue from different points of view, which is often the result of their lack of direct knowledge of the topic, African authors' writing is in itself discovered to be ambivalent and not at all invariable. The reasons for such ambivalence are then discussed in greater context, focusing on the effect of the authors' personal contact with circumcision as well as their knowledge and acceptance of Western values. The author concludes by establishing the African ambivalent attitude towards FGM, which includes different aspects of the issue, as the most significant difference between their and African American writers' description of this practice.

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.

Addition by Subtraction: Toward a Literary History of Racial Representation

In Mistaken Identity, Holly Jackson argues that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a putative pioneer of African-American women's literature, turns out to be at all. Jackson concludes her essay with the following words: I began my on Kelley-Hawkins hoping to add to our understanding of the of women's writing that has been so painstakingly reconstructed after more than a century of forgetting. But in the end, Kelley-Hawkins from that should produce a more accurate understanding of that tradition. After all, previous scholarship on Kelley-Hawkins has carried the burden of constructing a coherent race-based literary tradition in which her novels connect meaningfully to those written by trailblazing feminists of that time. We have stretched our understanding of how women have written in America to incorporate texts that do not fit. (par. 24) In stating the conceptual virtue (such as accuracy) of subtracting Kelley-Hawkins from [the] canon of women's writing, Jackson consummates her analytic move from paratext to text. According to Gerard Genette, the paratext comprises written or illustrative signifiers surrounding a literary text, such as those describing the author, publisher, site of publication, critical reception, and commercialization. The paratext informs our assumptions about, and guides our approach to, a literary text; it dictates how we classify, interpret, and evaluate that text (1). For Jackson, a key paratext is the US Census (1840 to 1910). Alongside obituaries and early literary editions, the census enables her to disprove the longstanding scholarly assumption that Kelley-Hawkins was Black. Simultaneously, she suggests that Kelley-Hawkins's 1891 and 1895 novels, Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, should be removed from the canon--and, by extension, the tradition--of African American literature. By using the census, the methodology of Jackson's scholarly detective work resembles that of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who, ironically, was responsible for our initial assumption that Kelley-Hawkins was Black. (1) He selected Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, among other recovered novels by Black women, for his 1988 edition of the multi-volume Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published by Oxford University Press and sponsored by Harlem's Schomburg Library for Research in Black Culture. The fact that a couple of decades passed before someone, such as Jackson, verified Kelley-Hawkins's racial identity defies the record of Gates's own thoroughgoing scholarship. Indeed, five years before the publication of the Schomburg Library, Gates confirmed the racial identity of Harriet E. Wilson. In the introduction to his 1983 edition of Our Nig (initially published in 1859), Gates claims that this was the first novel written by a Black person and published in the United States. Gates focuses on the death notice for Wilson's son, George, in which he is marked as black and in which the listed name Mrs. H. E. matches that on the copyright page of the first edition of Our Nig. Gates thereby concludes that Harriet E. Wilson was both Black and the author of Our Nig (Introduction, Our Nig xiii). Nearly two decades later, Gates again incorporated meticulous in trying to prove that Hannah Crafts, the author of The Bondwoman's Narrative (written circa 1853 to 1861), was Black. The proof would have made this the first novel by an enslaved Black woman published in the United States. But this attempt turned out to be not as successful. To date, the evidence remains circumstantial. Crafts's racial Blackness remains only a possibility, not a certainty. Gates concludes that answering lingering questions about Crafts's life and literature demands further research (Introduction, The Bondwoman's Narrative lxxii). The common reliance of Jackson and Gates on ostensibly authoritative evidence to identify Kelley-Hawkins and Wilson as white and as Black, respectively, has epistemological implications. …

Book Review: Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists

By Richard J. Douglass-Chin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8262-1311-1. Pp. ix + 228. $34.95. Richard J. Douglass-Chin has written an important, albeit uneven, book on origins of African American women's spiritual autobiography. Certain to appeal broadly to students of African American history, literature, and culture, Preacher Woman Sings Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists joins a number of recent works on awesome mystique of spiritual in black women's writings. Eight of thirteen writers examined in this detailed chronological study published texts before 1900: Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw (chapter two); Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Julia A. J. Foote (respectively, chapters three through rive); Amanda B. Smith, Elizabeth Broughton, and Virginia Broughton (chapter six). The life history of a ninth woman, Belinda, stolen into bondage, forms subject of chapter one, its title (The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like Moon) taken from African native's 1787 legal petition for reparations for involuntary labor. At chapter seven Preacher Woman pivots into twentieth-century African American women's literature by examining Zora Neale Hurston's acknowledgments and transformations of sacred-blues black traditions of modern novelist's literary foremothers. The eighth chapter reads invocation and deployment of spirituality in recent novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and late Toni Cade Bambara. Specifically, book attends to oppositional discourses that emerge at intersection of ecstasy, orality, Western literacy, and African expressivity. Douglass-Chin cogently combines analyses of blessed and blues to reclaim evangelist as a folk signifier and to ameliorate its definition so that the evangelists may all be seen as blues `bad' women [...] cut from a more pious cloth than their secular singing sisters (10). Too frequently Preacher Woman drops thread of blues matron and blues matrix as method and trope. However, a more urgent problem undermines Douglass-Chin's achievement: his study misrepresents primacy of sentimentalism as deployed by both African- and Anglo-American women in nineteenth century. It appears that Douglass-Chin perceives early black women's blues to be at odds with sentimentality. Indeed, Douglass-Chin insufficiently recognizes sentimental strategies, contending in introduction that, refusing to employ sentimental form and content of so many nineteenth-century women's texts, majority of black female evangelists' works were ignored and bypassed on literary market and simply fell out of circulation (14; my emphasis). The relatively brief shelf life of most black holy women's writings, however, had more to do with poverty, illiteracy, and fallacies about black and female intelligence--all institutionalized by white patriarchy--than with their authors' failure to conform to sentimental conventions of more lucrative narratives. Moreover, rhetoric of one Baptist missionary's autobiography, The Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (not cited in Preacher Woman) discloses deep ambivalence about propriety of sentimentalizing black life. Significantly, Prince's Life first appeared in 1850 and was reissued at least twice--in 1853 and 1856. As such, it is representative of black women's spiritual texts. An apparent bias against sentimentalism undercuts Preacher Woman most conspicuously in chapter rive, in which Douglass-Chin misreads Foote's combined engagement and subversion of sentimental pedagogy in A Brand Plucked from Fire. Because Preacher Woman glaringly omits recent scholarship on role of sacred in early American sentimentalism, it cannot elucidate thirteen authors' codification of Christian morality and theology in sentimental terms. …

Somebody Else's Foremother: David Haynes and Zora Neale Hurston

If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written. (Mary Helen Washington, 'Darkened Eye' 35) It is not late-breaking news that literary criticism is another form of storytelling, of mythmaking. (Deborah E. McDowell, Reading 118) Introduction: Possessing the Secret of Their Eyes Were Watching God David Haynes's 1995 novel Somebody Else's Mama takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, while its narrative logic ultimately leads to what Mary Helen Washington terms a recurring in the fiction of black women writers, a in which women intimacies that can be trusted only to a spirit (' Darkened Eye' 35). Washington, in her lucid and impassioned 1987 essay 'The Darkened Eye Restored': Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women, cites the friendship between Janie Crawford and Pheoby Watson in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as providing one of the clearest enactments of that scene in black women's literature. According to Washington, the conversation between Janie and Pheoby at the novel's end represents an exemplary moment of female bonding, itself a prerequisite for women's (36). Similarly drawn together and defined by shared story, Paula Johnson and Miss Xenobia Kezee - the central characters in David Haynes's Somebody Else's Mama - are also talking just to each other at the end of the book. The novel thus ends with a convention Washington associates with African American women's literature in general, and Their Eyes Were Watching God in particular. By thus implicitly declaring himself and Somebody Else's Mama to be sympathetic, kindred spirits of Hurston and her novel, Haynes intervenes in conventionally gendered constructions of an African American literary tradition. Their Eyes Were Watching God has constituted one of the most common sites for a contemporary, critical, and textual form of bonding among many African American women literary intellectuals. A number of contemporary black feminist writers and critics (Alice Walker, most famously) have dated their introduction and conversion to the study of African American women's writing from their first encounter with Hurston's novel. Their reading of the book, along with an account of the reading experience as personally and intellectually transformative, has provided them a means of self-definition as black feminist literary critics. These accounts often engage a rhetoric of possessives: The women possess, or are possessed by, Hurston and Their Eyes. Sherley Anne Williams, in her foreword to the 1978 University of Illinois Press re-issue of the book, recounts her initial, graduate school encounter with Hurston in a time when literature was still an exotic subject (vi). Having to share with other students the few available copies of a then-out-of-print Their Eyes, Williams reports that, when it had finally become [her] turn to read the book, she became Zora Neale's for life (vii). Mary Helen Washington, in her foreword to the 1990 Harper & Row edition of Their Eyes, traces a similarly possessive, but more collective, history for black women readers and teachers of Hurston's text: Like most of my friends and colleagues who were teaching in the newly formed Black Studies departments in the late sixties, I can still recall quite vividly my own discovery of Their Eyes.... Andrea Rushing, then an instructor in the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, remembers reading Their Eyes in a women's study group with Nellie McKay, Barbara Smith, and Gail Pemberton. …

"Love Me Like I Like to Be": The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text at once (ac)claimed for its ability to speak to contemporary gender and sexual politics and blamed for its inability to speak to the local, particularized politics of its time. Their Eyes has been used to situate strong, culture-based women at the center of an African American women's literary tradition, on the one hand, and has been read as reinforcing primitivism or as idealizing the folk, on the other.(1) As important as Hurston's critical reception has been, it has mediated against considering her work as politicized in her own historical moment. Just as Claudia Tate notes the invisibility of the politics of early black domestic fiction, I am suggesting that much of the political embeddedness of Hurston's text has been lost. Their Eyes engages in early twentieth-century black feminist politics. To develop a context for the sexual politics of earlier writers, critics and historians have turned to the discourses of the black women's club movement, which had its origins in the antilynching campaign, and the classic blues, sung and written in large part by African American women. Pauline Hopkins and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in particular, have been read as engaged in the political debates of the black women's club movement, as have Hurston's contemporaries Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, and, obliquely, Jessie Fauset (Tate; Carby, Reconstructing; McDowell, 'Nameless' 142).(2) Unaccountably, Hurston has been left out of this investigation, even though Their Eyes clearly took shape within a broad continuum of African American women's writing on sexuality early in this century.(3) Hurston's biography supports such historical contextualization of her work. She worked for Mary McLeod Bethune just before Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 and traveled in the same circles as Alice Dunbar Nelson, an officer in the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (Hemenway 19; Hull 90, 166). In addition, the discourse of the anti-lynching campaign must have been particularly visible to a student at Howard just before and during the push for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922.(4) Hurston was also an authority on African American folk music, assisting Alan Lomax in his collecting and recording for the Music Division of the Library of Congress in 1935 (Hemenway 211). Although Hazel Carby has read Hurston as opposed to urban or commercialized versions of the blues (Politics 75), her relationship to them was complex. Hurston was a friend of Ethel Waters, for example, and attempted to sell her a song on at least one occasion (Hemenway 207, 284). On a trip with Langston Hughes, she stayed with Bessie Smith (106) and was quite familiar with Harlem cabarets as well as the Southern tent-show and vaudeville tradition which showcased classic blues singers (26-27). In fact, she once joined a traveling theatrical troupe as a wardrobe girl (17).(5) It is my contention that Hurston has been left out of this debate primarily because her text disrupts neat dichotomies between respectability and desire, middle- and working-class discourses, and club and blues women. Their Eyes alludes to the politics of rape and lynching, as I discuss in detail below, by first charging Janie with sexual misconduct and then by exonerating her, primarily in the trial scene. However, Their Eyes does not reject charges of African American women's libidinousness at the expense of sexual expression, as literary critics have argued of other texts from this period. Critics like Carby and Deborah McDowell have generally read African American women's literature during the Harlem Renaissance as replicating the middle-class conservatism of club discourse and as opposing or suppressing the liberatory sexual discourse of the blues.(6) Hurston's text doesn't fit this critical bifurcation. Historians, too, claim that club and blues discourses existed to some extent in opposition to one another. …