Contemporary African American Women Research Articles

(Mis)Recognition of Post-blackness through Crossings in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Post-blackness emerged as a reaction against the commonly old-fashioned and restrictive representation of blackness to enhance for a more fluid, flexible and fruitful representation of blackness. It is a shifting discourse for securing a multidimensional consideration of black identity that most contemporary African American women aspire to attain. Nevertheless, the pernicious influences of black authenticity and racial essentialism cast serious doubts on the premises of post-black rhetoric and complicate the recognition of post-black identity for African American women within and across geo-racial borders. Danzy Senna is one of the post-soul writers who shed light on this critical problem in her first novel Caucasia. She depicts the tiring journey of her female protagonist Birdie Lee who keeps crossing color and geographical borders in an endeavor to resist the grips of black authenticity and racial invisibility and to recognize the fluid form of post-black identity. The possibility of Birdie’s (mis)recognition of post-black identity throughout her crossing journey is the central issue at stake. The present paper tends to illustrate the dilemma of her migrating female protagonist who is torn between the pressure of authentic blackness and the desire for post-blackness, between the influence of invisible blackness and the quest for black visibility. Interestingly, it investigates the extent to which she succeeds in recognizing a space of post-blackness through crossing practices.

“And the word became . . . gossip?” Unhinging the Samaritan woman in the age of #MeToo

This article examines the Samaritan woman’s speech in John 4. More specifically, this article employs a womanist hermeneutic of “unhinging” to argue that the Samaritan woman serves as an example for women who struggle with issues of testimonial authority in the midst of silence and shame at the hand of their communities. Thinking through the dynamic of the #MeToo movement and issues of power, testimonial authority, and trauma, this article interrogates the phrases dia ton logon (“because of the word”) and dia tēn sēn lalian (“because of your gossip”) to argue that, although the Samaritan woman possesses agency and voice with the power to engage Jesus in theological discussions, interpreters of her story still interrogate her for perceived sexual indiscretions to the point of her continued silence and shame in the history of interpretation. This article wrestles with both the Johannine author’s and the Samaritan community’s reducing her agency and voice to the point that readers live in ambiguity regarding her status. Concluding thoughts imagine what “living in ambiguity” looks like as a way to unhinge not only the Samaritan woman but contemporary African American church women from the experiences of silence and shaming in the age of #MeToo.

Жіночі голоси протесту: поезія Соні Санчес і Ніккі Джованні

The paper explores contemporary African American women’s protest poetry in the light of the liberation movements of the mid-20th century – Black Power, Black Arts Movement, Second Wave Feminism. The research focuses on political, social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the Black women’s resistance poetry, its spirited dialogue with the feminist struggle, and undertakes its critical interpretation using the methodological tools of Cultural Studies. The poetics and style of protest poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, whose literary works have received little scholarly attention literary studies in Ukraine, are analyzed. Protest poetry is defined as politically and socially engaged verse which is oppositional, contestatory and resistant in its subject matter, as well as in the form of (re)presentation. Focusing on political and societal issues, such as slavery, racism, segregation, gender inequality, African American protest poetry is characterized by discourse of resistance and confrontation, disruption of standard English grammar, as well as conventional spelling and syntax. It is argued that militant poems of Sonia Sanchez are marked by the imitations of black speech rhythms and musical patterns of jazz and blues. Similarly, Nikki Giovanni relies on the oral tradition of African American people while creating poetry which was oriented towards performance. The linguistic content of Sanchez and Giovanni’s verses is lowercase lettering for notions associated with “white america”, obscenities targeted at societal racist practices, and erratic capitalization, nonstandard spacing, onomatopoeic syllables, use of vernacular as markers of Black culture. The works of African American women writers, which are under analysis in the essay, constitute creative poetic responses to traumatic history of African American people. Protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni explicitly express the rhetoric of Black nationalism and comply with the aesthetic principles of the Black Arts movement. They are perceived as consciousness-raising texts by their creators and the audiences they are addressed to. It is argued that although protest and resistance poetry is time- and context-bound, it can transcend the boundaries of historical contexts and act as timeless texts.

Rooted Pedagogies: Black Women Activist Teachers Planting Seeds

The history of activism on the part of African American women has laid the foundation on which contemporary African American women activists and scholars have developed theories, critiques, and cultural frameworks that challenges pre- established paradigms and epistemologies. This paper focuses on extending the research that begun on African American teacher activists to gain sufficient insight into their political perspectives and how their perspectives were manifested in their personal and professional lives to influence their role as a teacher. This study was informed by black feminist epistemology and it employs portraiture as its research methodology. Data analysis yielded significant findings. The subjects of the study considered those life experiences to be most significant that contributed in developing their critical consciousness as children through the influence of their family, school, and community. Each teacher pointed to the need to teach critical thinking skills so that students of color will be able to establish their places in the world as productive citizens. The pedagogical approaches of the black women activist teachers were theorized and it emerged as a model of Rooted Pedagogies grounded in the historical tradition of black women’s activism. Furthermore, the implications for teacher education and practice were discussed, alongside with the recommendations for future research.

Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and RepresentationCritical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational IdentityWomen’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and RepresentationCritical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational IdentityWomen’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

Re-enchanted with the Work

Re-enchanted with the Work

Art, Activism, and Labor: Community and Nation in Contemporary African American Women’s Literature

This essay reviews Carmen L. Phelps’s Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement and Courtney Thorsson’s Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels . Both monographs focus on acts of recovery in women’s African American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, seeking to revise and expand our understanding of community, black feminism, and the role of literary form in constructions of nation and identity.

Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's NovelsCourtneyThorsson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels Courtney Thorsson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.Courtney Thorsson makes bold arguments and examines texts by foundational twentieth century African American women authors in Women's Work. Authors Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison utilize their novels to narrate a (5), and Thorsson emphasizes the public and private work of Black women within the novels and their efforts to identify women's work rich terrain for literary negotiations of raced, gendered, individual, and communal identities (7). Women's work is multivalent, yet Thorsson is specifically concerned with organizing, cooking, mapping, dancing, and inscribing, for these forms relate to the construction of histories, identities, and nations for the Black women in each novel.Thorsson argues that Bambara, in The Salt Eaters, establishes Velma as a character who struggles to organize her inner, physical, and emotional nation while her recovery (after a suicide attempt) determines the well-being of the outer nation of those around her. Bambara describes notions of healing fractured selves, coalitions, and communities through organizing. Analyzing Ntozke Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Thorsson addresses Shange's use of recipes and cooking as acts of cultural nationalism in the crafting, recording, and transporting of foodways and practices across communities. Shange illuminates the importance of cooking and food preparation with the characters Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, for the value of the recipe is that it renders the labor of cooking (planning, shopping, measuring, sifting, mixing, baking, serving, and so on) entirely visible and largely transparent (77). Just as food travels and creates cultural nationalism in Shange's work, Thorsson identifies dancing as a form of important women's work and nation-building in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. The author details the various diasporic dances illustrated by Marshall, for each carries significance in building and dancing a nation. Through the travels of protagonist Avey, readers come to understand that dances of individuals and groups signify collective pasts, memories, experiences, and agency. Past experiences and memories open Naylor's Mama Day in the form of an island map, a matrilineal family tree, and a bill of sale for the distant enslaved matriarch of the Day family. Thorsson examines mapping in Naylor's work as a method of cultural nationalism in that Willow Springs is a cultural and geographical nation of its own because the island does not belong to any particular nation, yet has been influenced by the cultures and peoples of the US, Caribbean, and West Africa. …

Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels by Courtney Thorsson (review)

Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels by Courtney Thorsson (review)

Gwendolyn Brooks's Black Aesthetic of the Domestic

Gwendolyn Brooks has an undeniable influence on the work of late twentiethand early twenty-first century African American women poets. Honoree Jeffers dedicates her poem “One Morning Soon” (2007) to Brooks. In interviews, Harryette Mullen regularly mentions Brooks’s writings, especially Maud Martha (1953), as shaping her prose poetry (“Conversation”; “Not”; “Solo” 192, 201-02) and lists Brooks among the “literary ancestors” whom she “claims” (“Interview” 206). Nikky Finney also cites Brooks’s influence (“Art,” Lecture). At the 2012 National Book Festival, an audience member asked Finney, “What are the books you read over and over that you love?” She replied, “Anything by Gwendolyn Brooks. Anything.” Evie Shockley regularly calls Brooks an influence on her poetry and devotes a chapter of her scholarly book Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011) to Brooks. Poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander includes two essays on Brooks in The Black Interior (2004). Moments celebrating and engaging Brooks erupt so frequently in contemporary African American women’s poetry that they are too numerous to name here. Brooks is such a central influence that Mullen’s statement “I’m very much influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks, to the extent that sometimes I forget to even mention her” (“Conversation”) might describe Brooks’s presence in the work of many black women poets writing today. To “mention” and make visible Brooks’s influence, I consider here one of her important contributions to the African American literary tradition: a black aesthetic of the domestic. In her early and mid-career writing, Brooks depicts individual, private experience as a sphere of black agency with broad communal implications. Surprisingly, forceful practices of community occur mostly in domestic space: the protagonist of Maud Martha spares the life of a mouse while thinking through the meanings of motherhood; the old couple in “The Bean Eaters” (1960) raise questions of hunger and poverty; Pepita, dead under a cot in “In the Mecca” (1968), points to the dangers of the world for girls; “A Bronzeville Mother

Women's work: nationalism and contemporary African American women's novels

Women's work: nationalism and contemporary African American women's novels

If You Look in My Life: Love, Hip-Hop Soul, and Contemporary African American Womanhood

This essay reflects upon Mary J. Blige’s lyrical content as an entry point for delving into the relationship between hip-hop soul and contemporary African American womanhood. Hip hop is often viewed as a music-scape predominated by assertions of African American male identities. Hip-hop soul artists such as Blige created a distinct space for explorations of African American womanhood through their crafting and performing of women-centered hip-hop-era narratives. Mary J. Blige’s discography captures a contemporary African American working-class women’s ethos that pivots around the desire for love. Hip hop soul affords a narrative window into the lives, thoughts, and aspirations, of African American women of the hip hop generation. Moving from close readings of Blige’s lyrics from her debut and sophomore albums to critical considerations of Blige’s collaborations with African American male emcees, I situate this hip hop era songstress’s discography within black feminist oral and narrative traditions. Describing Blige’s lyrics as black feminist narratives further expands the parameters of hip-hop feminism and illuminates a viable and dynamic site for contesting both the primacy of masculinist narratives and the limited visibility of women-authored narratives within hip hop.

A Different Integration: Race and Disability in Early-Twentieth-Century African American Drama by Women

In a recent talk I gave, titled Fabulous Invalids Together: Why Disability in Mainstream Theater Matters, I asked: Why should we care about theater in this age of multiple visual media? And more to the point, why should we care about disability in theater, given how crips onstage have been so unimaginatively imagined? In response, I argued that we needed to understand a figure I have deemed the fabulous invalid, borrowing the title of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's 1938 play of the same name in which theater is represented as an invalid who is down but never out, perhaps dying but not dead yet. (1) In essence, I posited, this is a potentially rich figure that we ignore at our peril; it is one that we also need to update and embrace in considering the dramatic representation of disability, particularly in the face of the unceasing parade of disabled characters who limp, stroll, and sit on American stages. What if we rejected a cure or kill mentality in critical analysis of our own, hacking away from demanding that images be either politically resistant or polemically resisted? What if, instead, we embraced the idea that the range of disabled characters onstage over time, creates for audiences a kind of figurative fabulosity? This fabulous invalid, then, is a paradigm for understanding productive tensions in theater, for refusing to reject a given representation of disability as politically ineffectual just because it may seem to contain elements of the conventional or stereotypical, and for reclaiming those aspects of disability representation that do important aesthetic and political work. But, of course, the fabulous invalid has other aspects to her identity than disability. In his landmark essay Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies? the late Chris Bell pointedly and satirically presents his own modest proposal for perpetuating the bias of what he names White Disability Studies. When you come across a non-white disabled person, he writes, tongue firmly in cheek, focus on the disability, eliding the race and ethnicity, letting them he run over, forgotten. Do not consider how the intersection in which this subject lives influences her actions and the way she is seen. Choose not to see that intersection and move on down the road of disability, away from the perpendicular roads of race and ethnicity. The fact that the intersection exists is not your fault. It is prime example of poor engineering. (378) Bell's point is, of course, that these intersections of the different aspects of embodiment do matter and that we bypass them at our own peril; therefore, the fabulous invalid cannot be assumed to be the normate in every other way except disability. What, then, do the multiple identities of this figure offer as they intersect with disability, enhancing and enriching our understanding of how disability functions to make drama more fabulous in its very querying and queering of multiple social structures? In works by contemporary African American women playwrights, disability works with race and gender to give voice to the lived experience of being a disabled person of color, to call attention to common experiences, and to enhance an understanding of identities as socially constructed. Some examples include Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, which tells the story of Saartjie (Sarah) Bartman, the infamously nicknamed Venus Hottentot, whose excessive body was put on display for sideshow audiences in the nineteenth century; Parks's In the Blood, which references forced sterilization as it was deployed against poor, African American women; Lynn Nottage's Ruined, which shows the physical aftereffects of rape used as a tool of wartime violence in the Congo; and Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, which depicts illness and the contingency of the human body. These playwrights figure disability in various ways: to recount history, pain, sexual violence, caregiving, the disposability of disabled bodies of color in American society, and the intersecting and stigmatized experiences of women of color and the disabled. …

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: Shaping Identity through Violence

Cet article explore le sujet de la violence comme l’un des facteurs responsables de la formation de l´identite des femmes afro-americaines defavorisees, selon la description qu’en donnent les dramaturges afro-americaines. Deux approches sont considerees, d´un cote la mentalite feministe du peuple noir, et de l’autre, l’eloignement du multiculturalisme vers une perspective plus universaliste puisque la violence parait constante dans le temps et l´espace. L´article etudie les rapports entre ces theories et les œuvres de Suzan-Lori Parks In the Blood (1999) et de Kia Corthron Breath, Boom (2000). Les theoriciennes feministes Angela Davis et Patricia Hill Collins ont une approche centree sur l´intersection entre plusieurs formes d´oppression qui sont mises en relation pour eviter que des femmes comme Hester, mere sans ressources dans In the Blood et Prix, chef d´une bande dans Breath, Boom, puissent avoir l´opportunite d’atteindre la reconnaissance personnelle, et finalement, la reconnaissance sociale et la possibilite de s’ameliorer. Dans les deux pieces, l´identite des femmes noires se construit sous l’influence de la violence et de la maltraitance. L’element le plus perturbant dans ces textes, c´est de decouvrir que de nos jours des femmes, parmi les moins privilegiees et les plus marginales, peuvent mener des vies similaires a celles decrites dans ces œuvres theâtrales.

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class , and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films , and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture Jessica Petocz (bio) Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 200 pp., $40.00 hardcover. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films by Stephane Dunn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 192 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007, 334 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $9.95 on CD. Some of the most astute, moving, and well-known work in the Black feminist tradition revolves around the "problems" of Black women's sexuality—namely, the problem that others use it to play out battles over race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality and the subsequent lack of attention to their actual sexual experiences, desires, and subjectivities. Their scholarship demands that we recognize this displacement and the machinations it hides, but that we also create spaces for the enunciation and appreciation of the diversity of Black women's sexualities. Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Clarke, E. Francis White, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Cathy Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Evelyn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, … their names recall incisive intellect, beautiful words, and powerful stories. Drawing upon these rich sources, three new books by emerging scholars give a sense of the depth and breadth of a field that has grown into its own. In their work, Black feminist thought is anything but provincial—instead, their attention to the lives and work of Black women revises widely held ideas about race, gender, and sexuality and their relationship to our shared social context. Rather than revise theories that do not account for race and/or gender, these books begin with a sophisticated intersectional approach as developed with Black feminist thought. Through an analysis of representation and lived experience, each author dispels hegemonic conceptions of Black women and their sexualities. They employ nuanced argumentation, historical contextualization, interdisciplinary sources, and commitment to multiple politics in order to portray sexuality as a dynamic social and psychological force. Furthermore, they refuse to privilege theory, representation, or experience, opting instead to integrate these methods. In doing so, each author makes insightful claims without erasing the contradictions within the cultural representations and lived experiences of Black women. These texts present a needed opportunity to engage with popular cultural studies from politicized perspectives without denying the pleasure they provide. In these analyses, sexuality emerges as a transfer point between different axes of [End Page 274] power and demonstrates the inextricability of the material and the discursive. As teaching texts, these books provide challenging yet accessible intersectional analyses in interdisciplinary contexts that can be incorporated into courses as diverse as visual literacy, hip-hop, social movements, performance studies, historical studies, folklore, literature, action films, and queer theory. For readers within these fields, the books reinvigorate longstanding debates with new questions and fresh ideas. In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Lisa Thompson explores the powerful role that sexuality plays in contemporary African American middle-class women's lives. Thompson situates the Black lady in an environment of impossible and disempowering demands that demonstrate "how her sexuality stands in for a host of other concerns, anxieties, and fantasies in the minds of others" (7). Against this backdrop, Beyond the Black Lady presents an affirmative account of contemporary African American women's cultural texts that present new narratives of sexual agency. As Thompson explains in the introduction, several forces align so as to elide or diminish our attention to middle-class Black women's sexuality (6–11). Yet, Beyond the Black Lady is more than straightforward restoration of their voices, for it also aims to reconceptualize how race, class, and gender are represented, performed, and lived. The book shows that, stereotypes and social pressures notwithstanding, Black middle-class women's cultural production...

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook

Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. By Lisa M. Anderson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008; pp. 152, 6 photographs. $35 cloth. - Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. 224. $120 cloth.

Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. By Lisa M. Anderson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008; pp. 152, 6 photographs. $35 cloth. - Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. 224. $120 cloth.

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. London: Routledge, 2007; 207 pp. $120.00 cloth.

<i>Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook.</i> Edited by Philip C. Kolin. London: Routledge, 2007; 207 pp. $120.00 cloth.

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.

Contemporary African American women playwrights: a casebook

Contemporary African American women playwrights: a casebook