Black Feminist Criticism Research Articles

Releasing the pursuit of bouncin' and behavin' hair: natural hair as an Afrocentric feminist aesthetic for beauty

Hair, like the issue of skin colour, carries much historical and social baggage in the African American community. Since slavery, the colour caste system within the African American community has perpetuated internalized racism and selfhatred. The system promotes a hierarchy that suggests the more European one's features - the lighter one's skin, the less ethnic one's facial features and the straighter and longer one's hair - the greater one's social value. Since non-discursive phenomena are included in the scope of rhetoric, visual images, such as choice of hairstyles, are rhetorical. Using an Afrocentric-feminist critical framing, I argue that some women who choose to wear their hair natural are making a rhetorical statement that resists Eurocentric standards of beauty while engaging in an act of self-definition and liberation. Since one of the primary interests in both Afrocentric and black feminist criticism is to understand how oppression is constructed and eliminated, this study seeks to understand (1) how a Eurocentric standard of beauty is constructed and perpetuated in American culture and (2) how some women have challenged and transformed this universal standard by the choice they make in how they wear their hair. This rhetorical analysis will provide an overview of the politics of hair in the African American community and apply an Afrocentric-black feminist critical lens to the narratives of fourteen women who have chosen to wear their hair natural.

Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Telling a Critical Story:Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Laurie McMillan Since the 1970s, the personal voice has been brought to bear more and more often on literary criticism, leading Nancy Miller to describe the 1990s as a time of "confessional culture" that manifested itself in academia with "personal criticism and other autobiographical acts" (But Enough xiv, 1-2).1 Though we have now entered a new century, the trend does not appear to be waning, yet autobiographical criticism is still often greeted with hesitation. While many scholars using personal writing in their criticism claim with Ruth Behar that such work is well-suited to addressing "serious social issues" (B2), critics point out that the personal voice does not actually effect change. Daphne Patai, for example, announces that "personal disclosures" and "self-reflexivity [do] not change reality. [Such approaches do] not redistribute income, gain political rights for the powerless, create housing for the homeless, or improve health" (A52). Despite the clear lack of direct political intervention wrought by personal criticism, however, I am not willing to dismiss it as completely irrelevant to questions of social justice. Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) is one text that shows how self-conscious autobiography can be a useful tool to wield in a politically-motivated critical practice. Three of Walker's essays in particular—"Beyond the Peacock," "Looking for Zora," and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"—demonstrate how personal criticism can use performative elements to increase its effectiveness. Walker's particular style of performance involves the use of story narratives that emphasize the highly constructed and textually mediated qualities of her self-representation. Readers are thus encouraged to interpret Walker's writing on multiple levels—not only as personal testimony but also as literary criticism and allegory—effectively bringing the personal voice into criticism without [End Page 107] falling into traps of essentialism. As it renegotiates readings of the past, then, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens demonstrates the way literary criticism can use performative autobiography to influence cultural practices and potentially change material lives. The Debate Over Personal Criticism i. The pros Although the reasons why critics choose to write autobiographically vary enormously, three factors are central to the use of personal criticism in Alice Walker and other writers who are committed to literary criticism as a vehicle for social change. First, autobiography allows scholars writing from traditionally marginalized positions to simultaneously assert the legitimacy of their viewpoints and challenge perspectives that have been presented as disinterested and universal. Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt thus claims the personal voice as a way "to assume the validity and authority of one's voice, the significance of one's experience, and the implicit value of one's insight and perspective" (197). Such a gesture is political in itself on occasions when it challenges ideas about who is allowed to speak. At the same time, autobiographical criticism has the power to change dominant discourses by raising awareness of views outside of the mainstream. Many black feminist critics especially prize the disruptive power of scholarship: Barbara Smith proposes a "highly innovative" literary criticism that the black feminist critic "would think and write out of her own identity" (137), while scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Valerie Smith believe that attention to the experiences of black women may potentially radicalize discourses of race and gender. When followed to its logical outcome, the wariness of false universals and the valuing of multiple viewpoints lead to a vision of literary criticism that perpetually attends to issues of difference. Mae Henderson thus calls for "a multiplicity of 'interested readings' which resists the totalizing character of much theory and criticism" (162). Such a vision may be at least partially realized through autobiographical criticism as it focuses on the local and the particular. Autobiographical criticism may do political work not only by acting as an antidote to universalizing tendencies but also by affirming the value of personal writing, a genre long devalued in its associations with both women and African Americans. The slogan connecting the personal and the political in the Women's Liberation Movement implicitly points to a long tradition of women's writing...

Black Feminism and Queer Families: A Conversation with Thomas Allen Harris

In Vintage: Families of Value (1995) Anita Jones proclaims, have chose to do like my mother and be a warrior... 'cause I'm a lesbian. My life has evolved around women being sensual, and I rather enjoy it. Speaking forthrightly to the camera, Jones identifies some of the larger challenges raised by black women's lived experiences and by black feminist paradigms working to disrupt the silences surrounding black female sexualities. In Thomas Allen Harris's innovative documentary, which chronicles the lives of three sets of black queer siblings over a five-year period, the women portrayed--Adrian Jones, Anita Jones, Anni Cammett, and Vanessa Eaddy--articulate the impact of their respective familial experiences on their mappings of sexuality and identity. Vintage, as a forum, opens a dialogue in which these women add their voices to black feminist work that redresses socio-political misconceptions of familial gender roles, matrilineal histories, and, more recently, black lesbian sexualities. Through this dialo gue the women in the film implode (a)historical renderings of black familial dysfunction as they imbue black women's experiences and sexualities with agency. By situating black women's experiences as an integral narrative of his experimental documentary, Harris's film enacts the necessity of the experience of supposedly 'ordinary' Black women whose 'unexceptional' actions (Smith and Hull xxi) become the peculiar project of a developing black queer narrative. Harris's film succeeds at appropriating the black family from its demoralized public media representation through a radical framing of the black family within a queer context. His queer depiction of the black family functions to dispel myths of its pathology by refusing to entertain its departure from a nuclear model. In its subject matter, Harris's documentary dispenses with overtly addressing structures of familial normativity imposed by hegemonic racial models. Instead, the film allows the historic racial and sexual prohibitions of the black family in the United States to be explored through the familial and sexual reclamations of the documentary's black siblings as doubly queer self -expression. Harris claims that, because few African American families conform to the patriarchal, nuclear-family model, they are depicted in popular media and government studies as amoral and in decay. Vintage cuts through these fictions of the 'vanishing' black family. Harris's film reconfigures the terms black and family in an attempt to depict the difference and diversity of meaning which these terms suggest. As a bold critical move in African American and queer cultural production, Harris's project subverts the notion of queerness as a discrete sexual identity or relation to others by taking as its focal point not the lover relationships of the queer siblings but the intra-familial, intra-racial, and class negotiations of identity and agency that each queer sibling grapples with in order to define him- or herself and his or her queer sexual desires. This broadened approach to exploring queerness is a much needed perspective if queer, as a critical model, is to prove useful beyond a select group or an essentialized sexual identity of lives and work. Harris's film, through the use of documentary, fantasy, and archival footage, theorizes as queer the contradictions and connections that the combinations of black and family and sexuality create in the United States. With many barriers set in place by the profit-motivated institution of slavery that defined for generations the destiny of a black woman's sexual being, as well as her children's, rupturing the silences and oppressions imposed on black female sexualities has been an endeavor fraught with violent revisitings and violating erasures. Over the course of the past two decades, at least since the appearance of Barbara Smith's essay Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, the process of breaking such silences through a critical black feminist perspective has been in progress. …

Love Jones: A Black Male Feminist Critique of Chester Himes's "If He Hollers Let Him Go"

n his insightful essay A Black Man's Place(s) in Black Feminist Criticism, Michael Awkward asks an important question: Can black men like himself-those who are deeply invested in resisting patriarchal power, and for whom black women's lives, art, and literature have been crucial to their own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development-do black feminist criticism? Responding to the womanist criticism of Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams and the psychoanalytical approach of Hortense Spillers, Awkward answers the question by emphasizing the role of black men in analyzing the of patriarchy that have already divided us (15). He concentrates on the ways that black men's criticism of black women's texts can enhance the study of black women's literature. For this criticism to be productive, Awkward argues, black men must eschew traditional patriarchal desires for control and erasure of the 'female,' and perform sophisticated, informed, and contentious critiques of phallocentric practices ... in an effort to redefine our notions of black male (and female) textuality and subjectivity (21).

Tribute: Barbara T. Christian (1943-2000)

This fall, for the first time since 1971, Barbara T. Christian was absent from the Berkeley campus. Scores of students and colleagues at Berkeley and around the country (and indeed throughout the world) felt a great emptiness in their own lives when Barbara died, on 25 June 2000, after being diagnosed with lung cancer six months before. The absence of Barbara's vitality and beauty, energy and brilliance, have left us all feeling bereft. Remarkably, three celebrations of her life have taken place in the past few months, as though we cannot adjust ourselves to this loss. Barbara was present to receive Berkeley's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation, on 19 April 2000, in the wood paneled, book-lined Morrison Room of Doe Library. The comfortable room was packed; people told stories. One young black man had called Barbara after reading one of her essays at a local community college. Barbara said to him, Why don't you come on over? A former graduate student, now a professor, responded, That was my story. On 30 June, a memorial service was attended by Barbara's friends and members of her family. The service reflected her love of flowers, music, and language. Several students read from her writing. In September, with the beginning of classes, the African American Studies Department sponsored an event, Celebrating the Life of Barbara T. Christian. Fourteen students, colleagues, and writers spoke. Chancellor Robert Berdahl wryly noted that he had become acquainted with Barbara's political skills during the strike of Ethnic Studies students in May, 1999. (The strikers succeeded in gaining several new faculty positions and a research center). He also said we should not underestimate how hard it was for her to start a whole new field. In fact, Barbara is famous for her discovery of the tradition of black women's literature. Her scholarship was prolific and wide-ranging. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1872-1976 came out in 1980 and Black Feminist Criticism in 1985. According to the memorial in April, these books and scores of essays and reviews stimulated as never before the embryonic field of African American feminist literary criticism. Black Women Novelists offered virtually the first comprehensive analysis of its subject, as well as a source of inspiration to younger scholars in approaching what eventually became a major area of American literary study. Barbara's was a life of firsts: in 1978, she became the first African American woman to win tenure at Berkeley and the first to be promoted to full professor in 1986. Barbara brought her own set of values to the

Feminist Media Criticism and Feminist Media Practices

This article explores four thematic areas in feminist media criticism. First, it considers how gender informs norms and values that pattern industry production practices and conventions. Next, it explores how feminist criticism has influenced one of the emergent areas in media scholarship: reception studies. This particular subgenre of media studies examines how audiences actively engage the mediascape around them. Third, the focus shifts to the rising influence of black feminist criticism, which has identified many of the tensions within feminism and also has pointed toward new modes of media criticism and practice. Fourth, the article examines how feminism has informed the study of masculinity. The final section of the article identifies and briefly discusses two areas that will forge new directions in feminist media studies: the burgeoning sex industry and globalization.

On Waiting to Exhale: Or What to Do When You're Feeling Black and Blue, a Review of Recent Black Feminist Criticism

On Waiting to Exhale: Or What to Do When You're Feeling Black and Blue, a Review of Recent Black Feminist Criticism

The truth that never hurts: writings on race, gender, and freedom

Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom provides a universal message about struggle, resistance, and freedom, grounded within a black Lesbian feminist critique of America's culture and politics. The cogently written essays represent a cross-section of work over the past twenty years and the first book dedicated exclusively to her own writing. Focusing on race, feminism, and the politics of sexuality, Smith provides an alternative lens to view the world by making connections between systems of oppression and offering suggestions for social change.--The Washington Blade Smith's book is an excellent example of powerful, introspective writing that challenges readers to reexamine their stance on complex issues concerning race and gender.--The Bloomsbury Review Stretches of sublime prose translate [Smith's] crystalline intellect to the page, exciting both mind and senses. --Publishers Weekly As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women in the early seventies, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining a black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of black and other women of color; in representing the lives of black lesbians and gay men; and in making connections between race, sexuality, and gender. essay Toward a Black Feminist Criticism is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women's literature. This essay also represented the first serious discussion of black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. Barbara Smith is cofounder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has edited three major collections about black women, including Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and is coeditor with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem of The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.

"Same Train Be Back Tomorrer": Ann Petry's The Narrows and the Repetition of History

1 interviews and writings from the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Petry frequently laments the decline in the current state of life in urban ghettos, remarking that it is than it was when she wrote Street, a 1946 bestseller. The sad truth about Street is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto, she writes in a 1988 autobiographical essay (Contemporary Authors 265). 1992 she told the Washington Post something similar: where ghetto life and race relations in the United States are concerned, everything is worse than it has ever been (Streitfeld E2). Petry's writing, especially Country Place (1947) and Narrows (1953), is preoccupied with this question--is the world getting any Surely this is a universal human concern, especially as she asks this question not only of ghetto life, but also of American society and of civilization in general. But the question carries with it some obvious variations and corollaries: whom is the world getting better? and In whose terms shall we define `better'? inquiry into the possibility of moral progress in society maps out, roughly, as a variation on the momentous and familiar question that African American writers have long been asked to address: whether or not to take a stand on matters of politics and sociology. yes side --commitment to politically contentious fiction--implies the possibility of progress, remediation, and transition, while the side--an apolitical aesthetic--implies in its resistance to historicism a belief in fallen human nature, mired in repetition. So the very question of history's progress or stasis occupies the shifting middle ground between what has been labeled sociology and what has been labeled art. the years shortly following their publication, critics commended Country Place and Narrows because these novels transcended racial themes. the past two decades, critics often ignore them for what I suspect is the same reason--there is no clear message about group affiliations, either race or gender.(1) While some critics continue to think political messages preclude artistry, there has come to be considerable disagreement on aesthetic matters. Cheryl Wall charts the slightly more preponderant viewpoint of today when she points out that African American writers, in contrast to writers in the white mainstream of American fiction, are supposed to be political in their intentions (286). Petry's concern in her later novels with historical progress or its lack is perhaps evidence of the alleged non-group-specificity of her themes. Narrows, the novel to which I will devote most of my discussion, suffering is often inescapable, an equal opportunity assailant. But the hope of easing racial oppression by decrying it competes with this sense of inevitability, and one significant sign of the world's improvement would be the improvement in the status of oppressed groups. Even allowing for early praise accorded to Narrows for its universal themes, most of the scholarly work done on Petry has been devoted to her first novel, Street, an attempt at realistic depiction of Harlem life during the depression. For advocates of a Black Aesthetic that collapses the distinction between politics and art, Street offers a focused, unrelenting downward spiral that communicates an important sociological message about the hollowness of the American Dream; meanwhile, black feminist criticism is attracted to it for its image of multiple oppression, among the most successful early attempts at such images in black American women's fiction, particularly as its protagonist is a dark-skinned black (see, for example, Gloria Wade-Gayles and Barbara Christian). Street goes beyond interrogating the categories of race, class, and gender, and in fact shows that when one is a member of several oppressed groups, the condition cannot be accounted for simply by adding or multiplying. …

Nella Larsen's Passing and the Fading Subject

. . . Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having suffer for the as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people were so cursed as Ham's dark children. (Passing 225) Although many critics have accused Nella Larsen of using as a pretext for examining other issues,(1) Passing (1929), her second novel, is profoundly concerned with racial identity. In Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring that the politics of sex as well as the politics of and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers (170). For Larsen, too, race is inextricable from the collateral issues - including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity. of course, alludes the crossing of the color line was once so familiar in American narratives of race, but in Larsen's novel the word also carries its colloquial meaning - death. Thus Passing's title, like the title of Larsen's earlier Quicksand, hints at the subject's in the narrative, or the possibility of aphanisis, which Jacques Lacan defines in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis as the of the subject behind the signifier. For Irene Westover Red field and Clare Kendry Bellew, the twin protagonists of Passing, the obliterating signifier is nigger, a word comes encapsulate their struggle with the conflicts of American racism and assimilation. The narrative representation of these conflicts also suggests at a symbolic level Larsen's repetition and working through of her own anxieties about the rejection she experienced as a result of her racial identity. Her hazy origins and almost traceless disappearance differentiate Larsen from the other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, but not from the characters of her own novels. Until the publication of the 1994 biography by Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen's life was shrouded in silence; not even the year of her birth was certain.(2) Davis's project was to remove the aura of mystery from Larsen's life (xix), an aura often resulted in critics' presentation of Larsen as inscrutable Other.(3) But with the details unearthed in her extensive research, Davis reveals Nella Larsen was deeply scarred by the reality of racism; her seeking of celebrity as a writer was in fact a symptom of the need for recognition and validation, something which she never received as a child and only tenuously as a young adult (Davis 10). As the daughter of the Danish immigrant Marie Hansen and the African American Peter Walker, Larsen was already doubly marginalized in American society, but when her mother remarried a white man (also a Danish immigrant), Larsen found herself so excluded from the family her mother did not even report her existence census takers in 1910 (Davis 27).(4) The Larsens orchestrated their dark daughter's absence from their Chicago home by sending her the Fisk Normal School in Nashville when she was only fifteen, and when the money ran out a year later, Marie Larsen apparently asked the sixteen-year-old Nella (then Nellie) make her own way in the world. Larsen vanished temporarily, resurfacing three years later at the Lincoln Training Hospital in New York City as a student nurse, where, according Davis, she began her ascent into the black middle class all alone (66, 70-72). Larsen's childhood rejection was seemingly reiterated in her 1919 marriage Elmer S. Imes, which ended in a much-publicized divorce in 1933. As Ann Allen Shockley explains, the deterioration of the marriage was accelerated by the overt antipathy felt by Larsen's light-skinned mother-in-law and, significantly, by Imes's indiscreet affair with Ethel Gilbert, a white staff member at Fisk University, where Imes taught physics (438). …

Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches

The 1993 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Toni Morrison is well established as one of the leading voices in American letters. Even so, her novels are often read narrowly rather than expansively, read as literary artifacts rather than as dynamic cultural texts. Without ignoring the literary and artistic achievements of Morrison's writing, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches calls attention to the cultural and political dimensions of her work. Drawing on a diverse range of approaches and theories-from W. E. B. DuBois to deconstruction and postmodernism, from black feminist criticism to reader response-these essays investigate such timely issues as debates about canonization, about race and gender divisions in America, about the founding assumptions of African American identity. Contributors: Barbara T. Christian, Marianne DeKoven, Dwight A. McBride, Patricia McKee, Richard C. Moreland, Toni Morrison, Rafael Perez-Torres, Nancy J. Peterson, James Phelan, Eusebio L. Rodrigues, Judylyn S. Ryan, Caroline M. Woidat These essays exemplify the kinds of issues being addressed in the nineties by scholars of Morrison and by the profession more broadly. The topics of the individual essays vary, but read together, they offer valuable insights into why Morrison has become a much celebrated, widely taught author.-from the Introduction

Reconstructing Motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces

In his foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. names Phillis Wheatley the symbolic mother of the black female literary tradition and suggests that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent.(1) The forty-volume Schomburg collection does much to flesh out this genealogy, for it includes several volumes of fiction and nonfiction from the era, the period between 1890 and 1910 that saw an unprecedented flowering of African American women's writing.(2) Contemporary black feminist critics have identified the political concerns motivating this generation of writers who, as Hazel Carby demonstrates, saw the novel as a form of cultural and political intervention in the struggle for black liberation from oppression. Central to this struggle, Carby suggests, was the project of reconstructing womanhood, for black women's public voice depended upon confronting and revising dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood.(3) But how was black motherhood reconstructed in the fiction and feminism of the woman's era? Given the historical erasure of black mothers as speaking subjects, how could maternity be claimed as a site of literary intervention at the beginning of the twentieth century?(4) Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) provides fertile ground for exploring such questions, for her romance functions in large part as a revisionary history of black motherhood; spanning from 1790 to 1900 and from Bermuda to Boston, Contending Forces juxtaposes the stories of slave mothers with those of early twentieth-century black mothers. While the novel's plot revolves as much around the reconciliation of a mother and her child as the union of star-crossed lovers, critics of Contending Forces have not examined in any detail its complicated representation of maternity.(5) Yet Hopkins' ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, portrayal of motherhood could contribute much to our understanding of early black women's writing about motherhood, from the vilification of white mothers in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) to the valorization of black mothers in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892).(6) Contending Forces could serve, as well, as a benchmark for examining twentieth-century depictions of black maternity, for it reflects the contested meanings of black motherhood at the turn of the century, when white theorists attributed the degeneracy of the black to the maternal failings of black women, while black intellectuals lauded the mother's vital role in progress. Hopkins' representation of maternity necessarily draws on ideologies of womanhood and motherhood current in the post-Reconstruction era: nineteenth-century, white notions of True Womanhood, which emphasized piety, purity, and domesticity, as well as early twentieth-century definitions of the black mother, which echoed the tenets of True Womanhood to extol the virtuous mother's role in racial uplift.(7) Yet as Hopkins shows, neither of these maternal ideals took into account the common experience of black mothers, who were victims of racially-motivated sexual violence both before and after Emancipation. Her intervention in these ideologies thus involves not only telling the real story of black mothers (she claims that incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred) but also interrogating contemporary racial and sexual discourses that contributed to black women's subjugation and limited their efficacy as mothers.(8) After a brief summary of the novel's rather complicated plot and a preliminary analysis of one paradigmatic scene, I will examine the ways Contending Forces as a whole employs racialized constructions of maternity--of white true mothers and black race mothers--even as it disrupts notions of racial determinism and gender essentialism on which these constructions depended. …

Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright

In Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (1988), Elizabeth Brown-Guillory declared that Childress is the only black woman in America whose plays have been written, produced, and published over a period of four decades.1 Childress wrote seventeen plays. Six have a history of both production and publication.2 Four of these plays, appearing on stage between 1949 and 1969 when she was writing and working exclusively in and for the American theatre, have procured for her many coveted awards, and great visibility. But it is still the norm to walk into popular bookstores and not see any plays by Alice Childress on the shelves. And it is possible to finger through publishers' catalogues under author, title, or subject and not find a listing for Childress, or discover that the few single editions of her plays have long been and remain out of print. This should not be since over the last twenty years, Childress's plays have been important subject matter for critical evaluation of the history of dramatic in the United States. Through historical-critical analysis of modern American in general and of black in particular, as well as black feminist criticism, feminist theories of dramatic criticism, and a resurgent wave of curricular inclusion of drama as literature, critics have analyzed Childress's plays ultimately as literature to be performed. But they also maintain in their analyses the fabulist view of the playwright as a storyteller, as an interpreter of reality. In their works, Samuel Hay, C. W. E. Bigsby, Carlton and Barbara Molette, Mance Williams, Genevieve Fabre, Emory Lewis, and Loften Mitchell reevaluate the themes of racial injustice and the struggle for human rights at the center of the stories Childress's plays tell.3 They all conclude that critics need to reconsider her plays as serious contributions to the literary and theatrical histories of how functions in American culture and society.4 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Margaret B. Wilkerson, John 0. Killens, Trudier Harris, Rosemary Curb, and Jeanne-Marie A. Miller have written books and articles examining the generation of Childress's strong black female protagonists, and her subjectivity of black women's issues concerning legal, educational, social, political, and economic struggle in this country. These scholars link Childress's plays to a literary tradition of black women writers from the New Negro Renaissance to modern and contemporary movements.5 In the same vein, Gayle Austin, Helene Keyssar, and Janet Brown explore plot and theme as ideological structures of a feminist premise and method of presentation in drama. They include Childress's plays among those of women dramatists from the United States and Europe in studies that reveal a dialogue on the political poetics of women's drama.6

Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference

Research Article| April 01 1994 Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference Ann DuCille Ann DuCille ann ducilleis associate professor of English and African American Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) and is currently working on two other books: “The Black Feminist Reader,” an edited volume of black feminist criticism, and “Inconspicuous Consumption: Labor, Leisure, and the Lady in Black Middle-Class Culture,” in which Barbie figures in the last chapter. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (1994) 6 (1): 46–68. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-6-1-46 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ann DuCille; Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference. differences 1 April 1994; 6 (1): 46–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-6-1-46 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 Journalsdifferences Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1994 by Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reply to Deborah Chay

I read a few pages of it the day it arrived and when I saw what you were attempting to do I put it aside. I was already dealing with enough stress, including the fact that one of my dearest friends was dying of breast cancer, and I decided that reading your essay was one negative experience I could spare myself. At the beginning of March, 1993 I decided to look at the essay again because I recalled that if I was going to write a reply, it needed to be sent to NLH in April. I read your article carefully and made marginal notes and other notes which I would be glad to share with you. I do not have time, however, to write an exhaustive theoretical argument refuting almost everything you have written about my two essays. I did want to state for the record my general response to your article. The bottom line is that you just don't get it. Even though you have obviously examined these two essays intensively, your assumptions about what I intended to do and your understanding of what I actually wrote are completely erroneous. You make dozens of points that are based upon inaccurate suppositions. I will list a few of the most glaring ones here. Your most significant mistake is your not comprehending why I wrote these essays to begin with, what I wanted to accomplish, and most especially what my politics as a Black feminist activist and organizer mean. I did not write Toward a Black Feminist Criticism

Clare Kendry's "True" Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen's Passing

Interpretations of Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen's earlier and more intriguing book, Quicksand (1928).1 This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel's main characters are neither purely psychological beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance. In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell, one of the most astute critics of Larsen's work, states that critics have been misled by the novel's epigraph ... [since] it invites the reader to place at the center of any critical interpretation.2 It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing's obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate's belief that, Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue.3 I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is all about race or rather, the mediation of in relation to sexuality and class.4 McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel's title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the text's meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that passes for straight and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen's work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the (McDowell reads it as a metaphorical vagina) but also the sender's (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell's by insisting on the importance of and class in Passing. If as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of

Looking Back from Zora, or Talking Out Both Sides My Mouth for those Who Have Two Ears

The concept of an identifiable Black women's literary tradition is, today, contested terrain.' Ten years after Barbara Smith articulated the need to trace such a tradition in her landmark essay Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, Hazel Carby, whose valuable work analyzes African-American women's literary and intellectual expression, suggested that her volume Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist does not assume the existence of a tradition or traditions of black women writing (16).2 The tenor of recent critical voicings within the field of African-American literature seems to suggest that to posit a tradition, like suggesting race exists, unqualified, is a bit naive, deterministic, and essentialist. In his foreword to The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates asserts that

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist , and: Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory , and: Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America , and: The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, and: Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, and: Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, and: The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition Edna L. Steeves Hazel V. Carby . Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 223 pp. $19.95. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr. , eds. Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory. Greenwood: Penkevill, 1988. 202 pp. No price given. Richard L. Jackson . Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. 166 pp. $23.00. Bernard W. Bell . The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987. 421 pp. $25.00. The title and subtitle of Hazel Carby's book provide the clue to its contents. Carby [End Page 310] argues that the image of the southern white woman—the wife of the plantation owner and the mistress of the plantation—formed the model for womanhood: woman is pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. When the Afro-American woman novelist appeared on the scene, that image of true womanhood had to be reconstructed. The southern belle may have been the model of noble womanhood, but her skin was always white. Carby examines the narratives of black women written between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the light such narratives throw upon the place and function of the novel in American culture. In May 1893, at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, the World's Congress of Representative Women was comprised overwhelmingly of white women delegates. Six black women, however, did address the Congress, all of them protesting the relatively small role American black women had been given in the women's suffrage and temperance movements. Widely regarded as the greatest fair in history, the locus of the exhibition was the "White City," built to house the exhibits in Jackson Park on Lake Michigan. It was literally and figuratively a white city to black Americans, for it symbolized the failure that the high hopes of emancipation and reconstruction had begun. Carby's book, which sets forth the contradictions experienced by black women who tried to establish a public presence in the nineteenth century, has four major concerns. First, black women had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies of womanhood from which they were excluded by the definition of "woman." Second, this book questions contemporary feminist historiography and literary criticism that presupposes sisterhood between black and white women. Third, although Afro-American literary and cultural history tends to marginalize the political importance of black women, the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of black women's autonomous organizations and the intellectual activity and productivity of such organizations. Fourth, the book presents a history of the emerging black woman novelist. As a first step toward assessing black feminist theory, Carby considers its history and major tendencies. "Reconstructing Womanhood," states Carby, "embodies a feminist critical practice that pays particular attention to the articulation of gender, race, and class. . . . This book works within the theoretical premises of societies 'structured in dominance' by class, by race, and by gender, and is a materialist account of the cultural production of black women intellectuals within the social relations that inscribed them." A revision of contemporary feminist historiography must investigate how racist ideologies have operated under different historical conditions. Carby claims that her book is a contribution to such a revision, a revision that examines the boundaries of sisterhood. The publisher's jacket describes Carby's book as "the first book to interpret and provide a cultural history of black American women's writing from slave narratives to the early twentieth century." This book deserves a respected place in what has become today a burgeoning literature dealing with Afro-American writers. Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory contains six essays devoted to the field. The first, Abena P. B. Busia's "Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Women's Rebellious Voices in the Novel of the African Diaspora," examines the emphasis on the spoken voice in...

Black feminist criticism and critical theory

Black feminist criticism and critical theory

Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Barbara Christian

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBlack Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Barbara Christian Joyce PettisJoyce Pettis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 12, Number 1Autumn, 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494306 Views: 18Total views on this site Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.