African American Women Writers Research Articles

Twentieth-Anniversary Reflections on <em>Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892</em> by Frances Smith Foster

Reviewed by: Twentieth-Anniversary Reflections on Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 by Frances Smith Foster John Ernest, Xiomara Santamarina, and Elizabeth Cali Twentieth-Anniversary Reflections on Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. by Frances Smith Foster Although I received a PhD from the University of Virginia, where I specialized in nineteenth-century American literature, back in the late 1980s those credentials didn’t require any particular knowledge of African American literature, and certainly not of any tradition of African American writing. At best, understanding African American literature meant knowing about a handful of books that could be fruitfully compared with the work of such major writers as Melville or Hawthorne—with, of course, the terms of the comparison inevitably being defined by the writers and tradition I knew. Thankfully, my students—all African American for a time, as I was involved in a recruitment program at Virginia—were only too happy to guide me toward an awareness of my ignorance. Because of them, I started on a self-determined program of reading that seemed to me more demanding than the PhD program I had just completed, particularly in that I’m still working on it today. Fortunately, I was blessed with excellent mentors, William Andrews and Francis Smith Foster, both of whom I had never met and would not meet or even communicate until much later in my career. But I read and studied their books carefully. My education was advanced considerably a few years later when Foster published Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Indeed, that book kept me busy for many years, in that it both provided me with a demanding reading list and challenged me to think about the tradition behind the list. Of course, it is Foster’s particular talent to present monumental challenges as calmly and unpretentiously as you please. “Not only did African American women appropriate the English language to record their truths,” she states in the book’s beginning pages, “but assuming prerogatives to its literary traditions, they consciously revised that tradition to more accurately conform to their truths and their visions” (2). That’s a sentence that will keep you up nights, I’ve found, especially when supported by Foster’s paradigmshifting study of African American women’s writings. How can you hope to read individual writers and texts without a strong sense of the tradition (which extends beyond literary productions and takes one into complicated historical and cultural realms)? But how can you come to an understanding of the tradition, except by reading writer after writer, text after text? Of course, one can simply take Foster’s word on both the tradition and the texts, but it seems to me that everything that Foster writes is written to foster debate, additional research, new discoveries, and alternate perspectives. You need to bring something to the table, not just come to it for ready truths. [End Page 118] It would be difficult to identify the single most important revelation presented in Written by Herself, but it is eminently possible to talk about the book’s ethical imperative. As Foster notes in her acknowledgments and demonstrates in every chapter, when she approached this project, “critical discussion of early African American women writers was virtually non-existent” (ix). Reprinted texts, anthologies, bibliographies, encyclopedias, and the like—the resources that make the work we do possible—were virtually nonexistent (with a few notable exceptions) before Foster, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Andrews, and others led the charge to research, organize, and publish such foundational work. And the critical discussion? Without Barbara Christian, Frances Smith Foster, Nellie McKay, and only a few others, where would we be? Written by Herself was not the last word on literary production by African American women from 1746 to 1892, and in fact Foster doesn’t deal in last words. It was a deeply thoughtful and detailed overview of a tradition that demands our attention, and Foster’s model for responding to those demands remains unsurpassed. Beyond all else, Foster taught me the importance of staying up nights to grapple with my own ignorance, so...

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide ed. by Martin Munro (review)

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide. Edited by Martin Munro, foreword by Dany Laferriere. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 232 pp. $22.50 paperback.Review by Tomaz CunninghamEdwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide, edited by Martin Munro, is a collection of fourteen essays followed by a personal interview with Edwidge and a thorough bibliography on her work. Divided into four sections, reader's guide addresses all of from her first highly-acclaimed and controversial novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) up to and including moving personal memoir Brother, I'm Dying (2007). Lesser known portions of work, such as her young adult fiction and travel writing, are addressed in this reader by academics, literary critics, and fellow writers of Caribbean fiction. Together, these fourteen essays provide a thorough and current perspective on work of an incredibly prolific writer whose personal story is one Munro describes as of modern (25).The first section of book, entitled Contexts, contains four essays, which attempts to examine both Edwidge personal life and her as they relate to Haitian, Caribbean, and African-American literature (11). Inside Out: A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat, a biographical essay by Munro, traces certain aspects of life from her youth in Duvalierist Haiti to her immigration to Brooklyn, New York and later relocation to Miami. Munro notes that connection to Haiti has largely been a result of migrant Haitian communities that she has been able to find in United States. Munro also names some of literary influences, both Haitian and African-American, and traces her growth as a writer from Eyes, Breath Memory to The Dew Breaker (2004), latter of which he describes as Danticat's most accomplished work to date (23). Similarly, essays by J. Michael Dash (Danticat and her Haitian Precursors) and Carine Mardorossian (Danticat and Caribbean Women Writers) examine work in context of Haitian and Caribbean literature and explore how both fits into and expands certain constructions of identity (national identity, gender, class and race for example) normally accepted in Caribbean literary expression. The most ambitious essay in this section is Danticat and The African American Women's Literary Tradition, in which RegineMichelle Jean-Charles compares with African-American women's writing. This essay seeks in some way to explain selfidentification as an African-Haitian American (AHA) woman and writer and explore how this identity impacts her writing. According to JeanCharles, shares certain themes common to AfricanAmerican women's writing, such as healing from sexual violence, closeknit female relationships, silence and voice and the transformative power of reading and writing (59). However, Jean-Charles also notes that race does not play such a crucial role in work as it does in literary tradition of most African-American women writers. Other factors, such as nationality, language and common experience of immigration inform identity of subjects as much as issues of race (58).Texts and Analyses, second section, is most useful portion of work from a standpoint of literary criticism. This section examines entire corpus of novels, young adult fiction, and travel writing. In Writing Young: Young Adult Fiction, Kiera Voclavik examines Behind Mountains (2002) and Anacaona (2005), noting that recurrent themes of exile, violence and sadness that characterize are as present in young adult fiction as they are in her fiction for mature audiences. The understandable absence of adult theme of sexual relations make young adult fiction an effective way to introduce young non-Haitian readers to culture and history. …

Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. By Katherine Clay Bassard. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America. By Renee K. Harrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

<i>Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible</i>. By Katherine Clay Bassard. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.<i>Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century</i>. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.<i>Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America</i>. By Renee K. Harrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

The Turn to the South: The Influence of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Southern Studies

DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN Cambridge Studies on the American South The Turn to the South: The Influence of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Southern Studies FEW AUTHORS HAVE EIGHT NEW VOLUMES OF THEIR WORK PUBLISHED posthumously. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who died in January 2007, is one. At her death, she left several lectures on marriage, given at Princeton University’s Madison Program; those lectures resulted in Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die, issued by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2008. The same year, Cambridge University Press published the second of Fox-Genovese and her husband Eugene Genovese’s “Mind of the Master Class” series, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order. It considers the question of slavery in the abstract in the thinking of Southern slaveholders. Cambridge brought out the last of the three volumes, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South, in 2011. It examines the self-deception in planters’ paternalistic rationalization of their discipline and exploitation of their slaves. The years from 2007 to 2011 saw as well preparation of five volumes of Fox-Genovese’ essays and talks—eighty in all—that mostly had not become parts of her, or her and her husband’s, books. The collective title is History & Women, Culture & Faith: Selected Writings of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.TheUniversityofSouthCarolinaPresspublishedthefirst two volumes, on women, in June 2011, with the others issuing over the following twelve months. Volume 1, Women Past and Present, focuses on women either in European and American (but not Southern) history or in the third of a century before Fox-Genovese’s death. The three other, non-Southern volumes include one of cultural and historical criticism and political analysis, one on religion, and a reader selected largely from the other volumes. Volume 3 is called Intersections: History, Culture, Ideology. The title of volume 4 is Explorations and Commitments: Religion, Faith, and Culture. The reader features a quote from Edmund Burke as the main title: Unbought Grace: An Elizabeth 558 David Moltke-Hansen Fox-Genovese Reader. Organized topically in sections and chronologically withinsections,thesefour volumes provideintellectualcontextsfor,and perspectives on, Fox-Genovese’s Southern studies. They also include several essays on Southern subjects other than women. It is the second volume of the five, Ghosts and Memories: White and Black Southern Women’s Lives and Writings, that considers how individual women reflected, reflected on, or transformed their Southern experiences in their writings—diaries as well as stories, novels as well as poetry, and autobiographies as well as slave narratives. Fox-Genovese at one time planned but never produced a volume on African American womenwriters, to include versions of some of these essays.Together,the fifteen pieces included in Volume 2 illustrate a dimension of her scholarship now often forgotten by Southernists, whether historians or literary scholars. Beginning with an essay in 1979 on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, she wrote voluminously on, and edited numerous texts of, white and black women writers either from or in the South. Many of these women, like Chopin, lived after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, so were not part of the cohorts Fox-Genovese examined in Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. The women in that most influential of her Southern studies volumes of course also were parts of the classes analyzed in the “Mind of the Master Class” series. The posthumous appearance of the last two volumes in that series, as well as of Ghosts and Memories, raises a question: now, finally, that the body of Fox-Genovese’s work in Southernstudiesisreadilyaccessibleinsubstantiallycompleteform,how does it add up? In answer, the three essays in this forum make several things clear. The first is that Fox-Genovese’s contributions in the field ranged widely, were voluminous, and appeared over more than a third of a century. A second point is that she brought to bear multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Long a Marxist, she never gave up class analysis. Trained in psychoanalysis and in statistics, as well as in intellectual and social history and political economy, she continually expanded her topical and disciplinary range—from political economy, in the era leading up to...

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible; Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction; Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible

Book Review| June 01 2011 Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible; Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction; Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. By Robert Alter. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2010. 198 pp. $19.95.Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction. By Douglas Alan Walrath. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 2010. xvi, 379 pp. $55.00.Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. By Katherine Clay Bassard. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2009. viii, 166 pp. $44.95. Claudia Stokes Claudia Stokes Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2011) 83 (2): 443–445. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1266117 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Claudia Stokes; Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible; Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction; Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. American Literature 1 June 2011; 83 (2): 443–445. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1266117 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review: Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible

Book Review: Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible

Reviewing the Unspeakable: An Analysis of Book-reviewing Practices of African American Women's Writings of the 1980s

The 1980s was a pivotal decade in the history of African American women's writing, as more women became published and wider appreciation and critical attention was being paid to their works. During this era, authors like Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker gained significant popular attention and opened doors for subsequent generations of African American female authors. The objective of this study is to assess the quality of book reviews for titles written or compiled by African American women authors published between 1980 and 1993 that appeared in important general book-reviewing sources frequently consulted by librarians for the activity of collection development. The study explores how widely reviewed the titles by African American women writers were by major reviewing journals consulted by library and information professionals and provides an assessment of the quality of the reviews that appeared. It was determined that a little over half (58 percent) of the titles received a review in the reviewing sources under scrutiny and that the reviews themselves were primarily descriptive in nature and frequently lacked evaluative details necessary to assist librarians in making decisions to acquire these titles for inclusion in library collections. This study is significant because library collections are an important part of the canonization process and because libraries are important institutions that both preserve and provide wide access to these works.

Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible, by Katherine Clay Bassard

Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible, by Katherine Clay Bassard

‘Betwixt and between’: literacy, liminality, and the celling of Black girls

In this article the author examines the lives of formerly incarcerated African American girls of ages 14–17 who participate in a playwriting and performance program in an urban southeastern American city and who consequently find themselves ‘betwixt and between’ incarcerated and liberated lives. Through interviews with formerly incarcerated girls in this program, participant observation, and student writing, this article contextualizes these girls' experiences in a larger discourse of African American women writers and speakers being ‘celled’ throughout the history of the United States. Interviews with girls revealed narratives that challenge education research to examine these lives on the periphery with urgency.

Transforming scriptures: African American women writers and the Bible

Provides a sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, theological, engagements with the Bible. It looks at how the authors respond as a collective literary witness to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Two Early Writings of African Diaspora: The Story of “Going to Sea” and the Autobiography of “Colored Me”

This study is on the early literary works of Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman writer, anthropologist and folklorist of the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the period of time when Hurston began her literary career, this study aims at tracing the procedure in which the author’s perspective on black identity and the subsequent interests in the theme of the African diaspora initiated and developed thereafter, through a close reading of her two earliest literary writings, which are the short stories “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921) and the autobiographical essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928). An authentic value of the study lies in the ways relating the two given texts, drawing the related topics from the texts, and developing the topics in terms of intertextuality. Reading the story of “Going to Sea,” this study discovers the two layers of time, historical and metaphoric, and the subsequent ahistorical time-space in which the black people's painful memories of leaving home, parting and loss transform into the joy of home coming, reunion and taking back, and accordingly an alternative survival strategy is possible for the African diaspora. Then the study relates such transcendental vision to the moment of Hurston’s recovering name and identity, represented by her rebirth as ‘Cosmic Zora’ who belongs to neither race nor time in her autobiography of ‘Colored Me.’ Like this, the study explores, through the intertextual space between the two given texts, the dynamics in which the survival strategy for the individual African Americans develops into a transcendental aesthetics of affirming life for the African diaspora.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

Richard Wright's Native Son (review)

Reviewed by: Richard Wright's Native Son E. Lâle Demirtürk Ana María Fraile , ed. Richard Wright's Native Son. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 260 pp. $73.00. There has been a growing number of edited collections on Richard Wright scholarship in recent decades. Yoshinobu Hakutani's Critical Essays on Richard Wright (1982), Keneth Kinnamon's New Essays on Native Son (1990), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah's Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), Arnold Rampersad's Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1994), and Robert J. Butler's The Critical Response to Richard Wright (1995), to mention a few, have made significant contributions to our understanding of Wright's works. Richard Wright's Native Son emerges as one such book, which engages a real dialogue not only between the articles in the book and the readers, but between the articles which seem to speak back to each other in an animated set of discussions about Native Son (1940). This seems to fit into the Dialogue Series Editor Michael J. Meyer's aim to bring together established and new voices in the academic community. All of the articles in the collection, written by eleven contributors from a wide range of universities in the United States and Spain, have appeared in the volume for the first time. The collection comprises five parts, each focusing on different aspects of Native Son. In the first part, Caleb Corkery's and Philip Goldstein's articles interpret the reception of the novel under a new light. On the one hand, Corkery [End Page 521] argues that Wright's image in the mind of American readers in 1940 explains the great impact of the novel on American culture, because the book enabled Wright to connect especially with liberal white American readers through a commonly held commitment to liberal ideologies. On the other, Goldstein's article contends how the radical politics of Max does not coincide with Bigger's sense of liberation, for this is closely related to Wright's transformation from a communist to a Black Power supporter as well as to the emergence of black studies and the fading influences of naturalism and modernism with changing times. In the second part, "Gendered Textualities," articles by Yvonne Robinson Jones and Carol E. Henderson highlight different views on Wright's representation of gender. Jones claims that Wright's sexism can be detected clearly in the novel, representing stereotyped black and white female characters, as he, in turn, stereotypes white males as potential racists, while also creating emasculated African American male characters, who use their agency to transcend their oppressive status. Henderson, on the other hand, focuses on the global implications of the representations of black women in the novel, which she argues paved the way for African American women writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry to revise Wright's images of black women, and hence search for new ways of representing black female subjectivity in the urban setting. In the third part, "Spatial Dynamics," Babacar M'Baye and Herman Beavers deal with the local and global spaces implicated in the novel. M'Baye places the novel alongside Wright's Black Power and The Color Curtain, locating all of them in international contexts, as these texts constitute a forceful critique of oppression in both the United States and the third world. According to M'Baye, Wright deconstructs the consequences of Western oppression on formerly colonized peoples in the United States and Africa. M'Baye also argues that Max's discourse stands for Wright's interpretation of how the social and cultural institutions embody the foundational ideology of slavery in the modern world. Beavers, on the other hand, claims that Wright embraced Edgar Allan Poe's use of vertical symbolism in his short fiction in the process of conceptualizing Bigger Thomas. Beavers focuses on Bigger as a figuration of surplus meaning, as he interprets the novel as a work that reveals thermodynamic principles. The fourth part, "A Polyphony of Genres," includes articles by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Heather Duerre Humann, and Carme Manuel, who discuss how different genres take new shapes in the novel. Fraile...

Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers

&lt;i&gt;Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings Elizabeth Archuleta Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, eds. Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 216 pp. Paper, $23.95. Although one does not usually find research on Phillis Wheatley and Paula Gunn Allen in the same book, the essays in Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings contribute to an emerging scholarship that is changing the ways in which we examine cross-cultural relationships between Native Americans and African Americans. Angela L. Cotten's and Christa Davis Acampora's edited collection adds to an already existing conversation by Daniel Littlefield, Tiya Miles, Claudio Saunt, James Brooks, Jonathan Brennan, and Matthew Restall, among others, on the historical and cultural exchanges between Native Americans and African Americans and works that signify on both traditions. Cotten and Acampora refer to a "crossblood literary aesthetics" that has grown out of these shared histories of and contact between African Americans and Native Americans, and they hope their collection encourages comparative approaches that examine overlapping traditions and cultures as well as aesthetic and philosophical innovations. Their collection challenges disciplinary boundaries that discourage comparative investigations of African American and Native American literatures. In addition to the editors' introduction, the volume includes three additional sections entitled "Transformative Aesthetics," "Critical Revisions," and "Re(in)fusing Feminism," suggesting methods for connecting the essays cross-culturally and comparatively. Part 2 uncovers the innovative structures created by Paula Gunn Allen, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams to [End Page 161] express healing, celebration, and their unique visions and experiences. Part 3 explores how Linda Hogan and Alice Walker revise literary and critical traditions, inscribing themselves into and speaking back to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist theories. Part 4 examines how the writing of Toni Morrison, Luci Tapahonso, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) questions feminism's narrow focus on gender and sexuality and how their early manifestations excluded race, colonialism, violence, and poverty. The editors note a dearth of scholarship on African American and Native American women's writing in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy, and their goal is to fill this gap by creating models for future comparative analyses. AnaLouise Keating takes a second look at Allen's Grandmothers of the Light, defining it as a different kind of self-help book. To distinguish it from other self-help books, Keating refers to Allen's book as a "womanist self-recovery" book that contains stories of empowerment rather than approaching it as an American Indian text. Elizabeth J. West uncovers in Wheatley's poetry examples of traditional African cosmologies combined with colonial American religious views, which would become the narrative core of contemporary African American women writers. Michael A. Anttonucci finds a blues aesthetic expressed in Williams's poetry, claiming that the blues had more of an aesthetic and cultural impact on American culture than is currently recognized. The essays in part 3 reveal how distinct literary works signify on other texts. Ellen L. Arnold brings Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing into dialogue, demonstrating their common goal of cultural recovery and healing gained through ecofeminist insights that claim an alliance between women and nature. In separate essays both Barbara S. Tracy and Angela L. Cotten discuss the ways in which Alice Walker's Meridian signifies on or engages in an African American call-and-response ritual with John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. By claiming that Walker's novel is a revision of Black Elk Speaks, Tracy points to Meridian as a multivoiced text that refuses to silence the complexities inherent in multiraced identities. Cotten analyzes Meridian through the lens of Karl Marx's historical materialism in order to see how Walker shares some of Marx's perspectives for social change. In comparing their views on social struggle Cotten demonstrates the value of comparative analysis for enriching Marxian and black radical traditions. Part 4's essays focus on women-centered themes and insights in Morrison's Paradise, Tapahonso's "Leda...

Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition Linda Watts (bio) Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 328 pp. Cheryl Wall has established a strong profile within higher education and literary scholarship, particularly in terms of her studies of Black women writers in the United States. Wall has published several well-regarded critical editions and original works highlighting the contributions of women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. I first became acquainted with Wall's research through her highly influential 1990 anthology, Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writings by Black Women. This collection featured essays written by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field: Abena Busia, Barbara Christian, Mae Henderson, Gloria Hull, Deborah McDowell, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate, and Susan Willis. With her latest book, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition, Wall offers a single-author volume of essays dealing with writers including Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker. Her premise is at once concise and profound: "One cannot embrace the future until one has confronted the past" (115). In this book, Wall conducts an inquiry into the ways in which well-known Black women writers negotiate vital relationships with literary and cultural precursors. To render vivid this notion of collaboration with one's predecessors, Wall draws a parallel between musical and literary processes of influence. "Worrying the line," a phrase borrowed from blues music, serves as a unifying concept for her study. This principle of recurrence involves the ways a given element within expression—a note, phrase, or other element—may be both intoned and altered over time. One who "worries the line" in music revisits and modifies an earlier utterance to match a new situation; similarly, in literature, to "worry the line" means to inflect a familiar (and, in a figurative sense, familial) text with renewed relevance. Such artists may underscore, clarify, contest, or supplement the artistic traditions that, taken together, constitute a musical repertoire or literary legacy. The line in question may be a line of a song, a line of inheritance, a color line, a lyric or phrase from music, a verbal fragment, or even an entire literary tradition. Both in terms of the stories the authors and their characters tell, the idea of "repetition with a difference" (16) [End Page 163] also conveys a shared preoccupation with genealogy and lineage. In this figure of the "line," Wall finds an evocative image for the role historical memory and cultural inheritance play within Black women writers' narratives. It is not unusual for African American writers to perceive their own writing lives as part of a longer story, one spanning generations. In The Man Who Cried I Am, John A. Williams features a character who understands his literary inheritance as a threshold to achievement, but only if he can leave the past behind. In this novel, Marion Dawes tells Harry Ames, "It is the duty of a son to destroy his father . . . you're the father of all contemporary Negro writers. We can't go beyond you until you're destroyed."1 Standing in sharp contrast to this outlook, mandating progress through destruction of the male ancestor, is Alice Walker's womanist journey in her by-now famous essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens."2 In her literary foremothers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Walker finds strength rather than constraint, a rich literary past in which to bask and on which to build. This view proves more characteristic of the outlook of many contemporary African American women writers. The tendency is toward rescuing rather than refusing antecedents, even in instances where their work demands adaptation. Wall's analogy to music serves to remind today's readers how precarious the connection to a collective past can be when life-giving stories must pass across generations of historically disenfranchised people. For example, African American folk forms, from work songs to quilts, had, of necessity, to encode (in ways discernible only to knowing ears and eyes) guidance about enduring or escaping the...

Encyclopedia of African American women writers

Preface List of Authors by Genre Chronological List of Authors Albert, Octavia Victoria Rogers Allen, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Sarah A. Anderson, Mignon Holland Angelou, Maya Ansa, Tina McElroy Austin, Doris Jean Baker, Nikki Bambara, Toni Cade Bennett, Gwendolyn Bonner, Marita Boyd, Candy Dawson Braxton, Joanne Brooks, Gwendolyn Brown, Linda Beatrice Burton, Annie Bush-Banks, Olivia Ward Butler, Octavia Caines, Jeannette Franklin Campbell, Bebe Moore Chase-Riboud, Barbara Childress, Alice Christian, Barbara T. Cleage, Pearl T. Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coleman, Wanda Collier, Eugenia W. Collins, Kathleen Conwell Cooper, Anna Julia Hayward Cooper, J. California Cortez, Jayne Danner, Margaret Esse Danticat, Edwidge Davenport, Doris Davis, Angela Y. Delaney, Lucy Derricote, Toi(nette) Marie De Veaux, Alexis Dixon, Edwina Streeter Dove, Rita Drumgoold, Kate Du Bois, Shirley Graham Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Edwards-Yearwood, Grace Elaw, Zilpha Evans, Mari Fabio, Sarah Webster Fauset, Jessie Redmon Ferrell, Carolyn Fields, Julia Foote, Julia A. J. Gaines, Patrice Gibson, Patricia Joann Gilbert, Mercedes Giovanni, Nikki Golden, Marita Gomez, Jewelle Greenfield, Eloise Grimk, Angelina Weld Guy, Rosa Guy-Sheftall, Beverly Hackley, Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hamilton, Virginia Hansberry, Lorraine Hansen, Joyce Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harrison, Juanita Henderson-Holmes, Safiya Herron, Carolivia Hodges, Frenchy Jolene Hooks, Bell Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth Hurston, Zora Neale Jackson, Angela Jackson, Elaine Jackson, Mae Jackson, Mattie Jane Jacobs, Harriet Ann Johnson, Amelia E. Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Jones, Gayl Jordan, June Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs Kennedy, Adrienne Kincaid, Jamaica Lane, Pinkie Gordon Larsen, Nella Lattany, Kristin Hunter Lee, Andrea Lee, Helen Elaine Lee, Jarena Lorde, Audra Geraldine Madgett, Naomi Long Marshall, Paule Mathis, Sharon Bell Matthews, Victoria Earle McElroy, Colleen J. McKissack, Patricia Meriwether, Louise Miller, May Millican, Arthenia J. Bates Monroe, Mary Moody, Anne Moore, Opal J. Morrison, Toni Mossell, Gertrude Bustill Mullen, Harryette Murphy, Beatrice Murray, Pauli Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Oliver, Diane Osbey, Brenda Marie Parker, Pat Parks, Suzan-Lori Plato, Ann Porter, Connie Potter, Eliza Prince, Mary Prince, Nancy Rahman, Aishah Randall, Alice Ray, Henrietta Cordelia Rhodes, Jewell Parker Rodgers, Carolyn Marie Saloy, Mona Lisa Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Dori Seacole, Mary Shaik, Fatima Shange, Ntozake Shockley, Ann Allen Smith, Amanda Berry Southerland, Ellease Stewart, Maria W. Summers, Barbara Tarry, Ellen Tate, Claudia Taylor, Mildred D. Taylor, Susie King Teasley, Lisa Terry, Lucy Thomas, Joyce Carol Thomas, Era Bell Tillman, Katherine Davis Chapman Todd, Ruth D. Vroman, Mary Elizabeth Wade-Gayles, Gloria Waniek, Marilyn Nelson Walker, Alice Walker, Margaret Walter, Mildred Pitts Wells-Barnett, Ida B. West, Dorothy Wheatley, Phyllis White, Paulette Childress Wilkinson, Brenda Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Wilson, Harriet E. Wright, Sarah Elizabeth Youngblood, Shay Appendix: List of Author Awards General Bibliography Index About the Editor and the Contributors

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers by Yolanda Williams Page, Editor

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers by Yolanda Williams Page, Editor

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.