Black Female Character Research Articles

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...

“A Geography of the Mind”

A selection of fictional narratives written by Black Canadian women writers, who are themselves immigrants to Canada, speaks to some “unease” in the central characters' understanding of self, as well as their relation to the environments or places they occupy. The characters' concern about self in relation to place, Canada, both in terms of its physical and imaginative geographies, is depicted through their physical and psychical journeys. The literature reveals several psychological, sociological, and historical implications of migration and its effect on the Black female character's process of self-understanding. By employing the landscape as a metaphor of psychological reflection and/or self-awareness, these writers demonstrate the ways in which the Black female characters negotiate and articulate their understanding of self in relation to their environment and, in turn, the ways in which that engagement shapes their understanding of Canada and being Canadian.

Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (review)

Harris, Wier. 2001. Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $18.95sc. 272pp. Terry Rowden College of Wooster Trudier Harris has been one of the most prolific, if under-recognized, presences in African-American literary criticism for the last twenty years. reasons for her relative anonymity for those outside of the orbit of the African-American critical community are, however, not hard to find. Her work, unlike that of her peers Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Henry Louis Gates,Jr., Deborah McDowell, and Hazel Carby, has not engaged modernist or postmodernist concerns or recognizably theoretical feminist or postcolonial issues with any obviousness or consistency. Nor has her writing been peppered with the linguistic markers that signal a self-consciously upto-date critical posture. Because of the manifestly straight-forward and jargon-free articulation of her insights that characterizes her writing, she has been, perhaps inevitably, relegated to the margins or simply absent from most of the high profile and influential debates on African-American fiction and culture. Despite its strengths, her latest book is not likely to change that situation. highly concept driven and sociologically informed nature of what are still her two strongest books, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982) and Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), has in her recent work, most notably Fiction and Folklore: Novels of Toni Morrison (1991) and now in this book, devolved into an analytic posture that often seems simplistic when compared to both Harris's earlier work and to more fully contextualized critical work on the topic by other scholars. Even in as early a text as From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, Harris was especially attentive to those characters in Black fiction which give the lie to the myth of the strength of black (44). In Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, she expands this interest into a sustained investigation of the textual representation of this myth. Over the course of a series of well-written but critically insular essays, Harris explores the image of The Strong Black Woman in selected works of African-American fiction and drama in terms and within conceptual parameters that should be easily accessible to advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or general readers with an interest in this issue. Still, despite the force of her considerations of particular texts, the most telling limitation of Saints, Sinners, Saviors is that the signal concept of The Strong Black Woman is not given the kind of definitional and conceptual clarity that would take her analysis beyond offering simply another, albeit well-argued, consideration of the received and stereotypical images of black women in African-American fiction. According to Harris, appearance of these images in African American literature and their evolution over more than a century suggests that African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated the literature in the twentieth century and threaten to continue that domination in the twenty-first. …

The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn

The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko After Behn Joyce Green MacDonald At the climax of a mid-eighteenth-century heroic tragedy, the black hero, discovered in a private chamber with the dead body of his white wife, urges the white men who come upon the sight to “Put up your Swords, and let not civil Broils” involve them in his own desperate fate.1 The play in question is not a version of Othello, as the remark about (bright?) swords and civil broils might at first suggest, but rather John Hawkesworth’s 1759 Oroonoko. Clearly, as Hawkesworth refashions Thomas Southerne’s 1696 dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella so as most readily and rightfully to fix “Attention . . . upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentrated” (H, A2v), he has Othello—a dignified, pathetic, mid-eighteenth-century kind of Othello—in mind. The kind of transaction he conducts with the Shakespearean tragedy, however, ranges beyond establishing similarities of tone. What this revision of Southerne (and beyond him, of Behn) also appropriates is a ready theatrical language for regularizing both Shakespeare’s wild passions and the radical racial and sexual ill-ease occasioned by Oroonoko. Audiences, it would seem, had a ready-made sentimental frame of reference for a miscegenous Oroonoko, but not for one whose enslaved lovers were of the same race. Hawkesworth’s play is only one part of a remarkable constellation of texts originating from Behn’s novella as it entered its eighteenth-century afterlife. In Behn, Imoinda is black like Oroonoko. In Hawkesworth and every other text following Behn, she is white. Only recently has this racial transformation become a subject for extended discussion in the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, primarily in relation to Southerne’s play, where it first occurs. 2 Yet there are several other white Imoindas after Behn, and I would like to direct my own inquiries into some of them, rather than solely into Southerne, whose play seems to me so radical a revision and literalizing of the sexual and economic implications of Behn as to require a separate discussion of its own. [End Page 71] Behn’s Oroonoko, of course, poses the most obvious exception to Lynda Boose’s assertion of the “unrepresentability” of African women in early modern texts. 3 Following Janet Adelman’s psychological analysis of masculine fear of women’s reproductive power in Shakespeare, Boose argues that the reason for the virtual absence of black female characters from this discourse is the white and masculine fear that the blackness of black female characters visibly marks them as the location of that dark place through which men must pass in order to be born as men: “The mother’s part in him threatens the fantasy of perfect self-replication that would preserve the father in the son.”4 I follow Boose, but consider the possibility that a denial of representation to African women has other rationales than the psychic; or rather, that the psychic is supplemented and articulated by the material practices of racism. The racial revisions eighteenth-century authors make in Behn—revisions which extend beyond the color of the heroine’s skin to include Behn’s constructions of character and gender identity—are worth examining for what they reveal about the relationships the period established between the social and sexual values and meanings implied by white and black skins, and by white and black sexual bodies. Historians of Atlantic slavery have only begun recovering the experiences of enslaved African women, detailing how their experiences in bondage differed from and overlapped with those of male slaves. 5 In the interest of extracting as much agricultural work from as many physically able slaves as possible, slave owners in the American colonies and the Caribbean made no distinction between male and female, putting women to work at the most difficult jobs alongside men: harnessing mules or oxen to steer crude wooden plows, cutting logs, hoeing and picking cotton, or chopping and milling sugar cane. Female slaves mined coal, dug canals...

Reconceptualizing Marriage in the Black Women's Literary Tradition

Reconceptualizing Marriage in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition Kai Jackson Issa (bio) duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. What happens to the marriage convention in novels written by Black women when they are viewed in the context of a people who for generations were denied the “hegemonic truth of legal marriage?” This is the central question that Ann duCille poses in The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. DuCille argues that the “marriage plot” is an area of Black women’s fiction neglected by critics. Her text is at all times engaging and provocative, as she moves through readings of Black women’s novels of the late 19th-century to those of the 1940s. In duCille’s work, we are challenged to view the tradition of Black women’s novels as one which uses marriage, or “coupling,” as a literary tool of subversion and protest. Furthermore, duCille challenges us to view this tradition in letters as one which includes many of the texts previously dismissed by critics for their alleged conformity to dominant and oppressive ideologies. DuCille begins her study with a critical re-reading of William Wells Brown’s 19th-century novel Clotel. Far from engaging in what many critics have labeled a “male discourse of desire” concentrated on the “masculinized subject of slavery” that maligns his Black female characters, duCille argues that Brown’s text prefigures the outright indictments of marriage to come in the later works by Black women novelists. In doing so she critically re-envisions Brown as an important and foundational literary ancestor of Black women novelists. From her reading of Clotel, duCille moves to the novels written by Black women in the 1890s. Focusing upon Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, duCille describes the period as one of intense political activism on the part of Black women. She asserts that Hopkins and Harper used the marriage plot and the “trope of passionlessness” to highlight race and gender issues. Ultimately, duCille aligns herself with critics Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate in refuting the charge by many critics that these 19th-century texts, with their mulatta heroines, were preoccupied with the dominant, Victorian values of a white readership. In her reading, duCille convincingly establishes that, on the contrary, both Harper and Hopkins advanced in their works a “sophisticated interplay” of gender and race critique, revised “patriarchal standards of female respectability,” and ultimately extended to Black women the protection of “idealized femininity.” DuCille [End Page 526] moves on to examine the 19th-century evangelical narratives of Emma Dunham Kelley and Amelia Johnson. DuCille challenges the common critical opinion that Kelley and Johnson’s characters are white, and she argues that even though their texts endorsed marriage as the “ideal relation,” that they were not without a critique of the institution. DuCille ends her first section by convincingly establishing that 19th-century Black women novelists celebrated the marriage convention as a “seemingly sexless meeting of like minds and sociopolitical ambitions,” a convention their Black women characters used for their own “emancipatory purposes.” DuCille’s most provocative chapter is her fourth one, “Blues Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and Texts of the Twenties and Thirties.” The chapter is the bridge linking the first section on 19th-century Black women novels to the section on the early 20th-century novels of Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston. DuCille characterizes this early 20th-century period as the “second flowering of black women’s novels” when the “gradual resexualization of black womanhood” had occurred. In Chapter Four, duCille expounds on her “Hurstonism” concept—that “conspicuous consumption” by critics of Hurston as the initiator of the Black women’s literary tradition. DuCille charges that this privileging has led to the exclusion in canonical considerations of many other important works, particularly those of Jessie Fauset, Dorothy West and Nella Larsen. DuCille argues that the blues form, which she calls the “metanym for authentic blackness,” is part of the “valorization of the vernacular” which has marginalized these novelists in the canon. Ultimately though, duCille is very nearly ensnared in...

This disease called strength: some observations on the compensating construction of black female character.

This disease called strength: some observations on the compensating construction of black female character.

Racial stereotyping on television: A comparison of the behavior of both Black and White television characters.

Television is a source of information that influences the formation of attitudes toward minority groups through its characterizations of them. This study investigated the behavior of both black and white characters on comedy programs to determine whether there were differences in their portrayal. We hypothesized that black characters would differ from white ones along several dimensions, for example, activity level and dominance, and that white characters on black programs would behave differently from whites on white or mixed programs. Three episodes each of black, white, and mixed comedy programs were videotaped. Raters tallied the behavior of 110 different characters on 12 types of behavior. A two-way analysis of variance, Sex X Race, indicated that racial stereotypes and sex role stereotypes were the basis for character portrayals on television. The differences between black female and white female characters seemed crucial to the depiction of the races. In addition, the portrayal of white characters on black programs was negative. The attitudes people have toward others are influenced to some degree by their percep