Contemporary Black Women Research Articles

The Dark Lady’s survival in contemporary Black women’s writing

ABSTRACT This article discusses contemporary literary texts that feature the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets as a Black woman from the past inhabiting the present: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), and Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). The analysis draws on recent approaches to temporality that offer a critique of linear concepts of time and their function for discourses of progress and modernity as well as ‘race’. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, Smith, Evaristo, and Williams address Black history and project anachronic relations between the early modern era and the present moment, as well as between Shakespeare and the contemporary Black woman writer.

Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold

ABSTRACT The genre of romance has until fairly recently predominantly depicted white protagonists and presented readers with limited representations of ethnic and racial diversity. This paper provides an overview of the ever-increasing number of Black British authors who are currently addressing this significant gap in the British publishing industry and analyse Bolu Babalola’s debut Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold (2020) as a case in point. Love in Colour is a collection of short stories which questions the universality of western tales of love and celebrates Black love and heritage. My contention is that Babalola’s collection, for its innovative elements, not only evinces that contemporary Black British women’s writing, characterized by aesthetic and formal innovations, continues to “test simple generic categories”, but, in its celebration of the transformative power of love, also demonstrates that Black love matters.

Review: Take Back What the Devil Stole: An African American Prophet’s Encounters in the Spirit World, by Onaje X. O. Woodbine

Perhaps the best comparison to Onaje Woodbine’s Take Back What the Devil Stole is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991). While McCarthy sought to elucidate and destigmatize the religion of Vodou by writing a biography of a Haitian manbo who had immigrated to the United States, Woodbine uses a similar methodology in his portrayal of African American prophet Donna Haskins. While the previous work depicts its subject through a feminist lens, the recent text rests upon a foundation of womanist theory. Perhaps most importantly, both Brown and Woodbine construct compelling, even moving, narratives of lived religion within a marginalized community.As Woodbine puts it, his goal is to examine “how a contemporary Black woman constructs ultimate meanings, often on the peripheries of social and political power” (5). In particular, he focuses on a concept of religion that emphasizes both everyday life as well as the centrality of the body. In order to achieve these goals and lay the groundwork for his subject’s eventual prophethood, he devotes close to half of the book to the period in which Donna, as he consistently calls her, suffers enormously from a succession of tragedies, beginning with an apartment fire that she survived only through divine intervention. For the remainder of her first forty-six years, she experiences abuse at the hands of her mother, struggles learning to read and write, rape and attempted rape, the death of a child through abortion, repeated infidelity on the part of boyfriends, and the murder of two beloved nephews. These incidents prompt her to consider suicide upon multiple occasions.The turning point in Donna’s life comes when she visits a Black Baptist church where she experiences a spiritual awakening that transforms her body into a potential receptacle of the divine. Among her first acts is to separate herself from the control of men by giving up sex altogether. Doing so involves an intense struggle with the spirit of lust, which takes place in an alternate reality that she refers to as the spirit world. Eventually, she meets Jesus in the spirit world, receiving the new name, Child of Light. After this encounter with God, she interacts with increasing numbers of spirits, human, angelic, and demonic. As she progresses spiritually, she receives “treasures from heaven” that allow her to travel throughout the cosmos and to move forward and backward through time. She has become a prophet.Through the power of the Holy Spirit, she strives to use her gifts for good instead of evil. For the living, she is a source of comfort who can carry their emotions and convey consoling facts that she sees from their past, present, and future. Donna also aids the spirits of the dead, freeing them from the effects of lives lived in marginality. Among her foes are perpetrators of violence, sexual and otherwise, against women and children.Along with its moving prose, the greatest strength of Take Back What the Devil Stole is how successful it is at achieving the author’s goal of telling a story from its subject’s perspective. Early in the book, one occasionally runs into jarring theoretical asides embedded in engaging tales of personal struggle. As the book advances, however, readers are apt to find themselves walking the spirit world alongside Donna without losing sight of the embodied lived religion that doing so entails.One of the few things that academic readers might desire to see featured more prominently is context. While the milieu in which Donna lives her life and sees herself spiritually transformed is everywhere in evidence, one might question how the rest of the world interacts with her. Clearly, she has a profound impact on the scholar, personally as well as academically, and there are a good number of anecdotes about Donna’s aid to neighbors, friends, family, and strangers. One is left to wonder, however, about the degree to which others seek her out. Likewise, though Donna and the author mention that there are many who dismiss her claims to prophethood, readers are left with little more than a statement that it happens. These are not so much flaws, however, as they are areas to expand upon in a new introduction to the second edition or perhaps in Take Back What the Devil Stole II.

Black Identities, Contemporary Literature, and Afro-diasporic Traditions

ABSTRACT The goal of this article is to provide a critical appraisal of the religious tropes embedded in contemporary Black women’s writing in Brazil. By examining Afro-diasporic religious symbols in literary texts, I highlight the survival of African deities as a significant move to transform the lasting effects of historical repression against African-derived religions. As cultural warriors, Black women writers use African heritage as a strategy to redress the history of derogation of Black humanity, affirm racial identities, and revise the epistemic violence sanctioned by institutionalized Christianity.

Training Anger with Accuracy: Audre Lorde's Invitation to Black Women

The article engages the work of Audre Lorde on rage between Black women. Focusing on her 1984 essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," the article explores destructive rage and Lorde's concern about the effect of this rage on Black women's capacity to build community together and feminist politics more broadly. Adopting an affective reading of Lorde's analysis, the article dissects her attention to the affect of rage as interwoven with other affective registers that include hate and pain. Lorde's insight and politics highlights a dimension of rage that is important to consider in contemporary Black women's feminist politics and organizing—the capacity for rage to destroy sisterhood and authentic healing. Her project of attending to such rage as a means to render it less powerful in effect remains an urgent one for us today.

To be sentimental, powerful, and Black: Affective agency in Viola Davis’s award speeches

This article considers how the long-standing American cultural tradition of sentimentality and its affective power can be discursively utilized by contemporary Black women in the public contexts. Using the concept of sentimental political storytelling as discussed by Rebecca Wanzo, I analyze three award speeches given by Viola Davis – a popular and acclaimed African American actress whose speeches generate significant public and media attention. Framing Davis’s speeches within the Black feminist epistemology, I draw on the conventions of sentimental storytelling proposed by Wanzo to argue that Davis is an example of a Black woman skilfully using sentimentality to gain affective agency and mobilize sympathy from mainstream public while at the same time narrativizing African Americans’ lived experiences to have their humanity and their struggle recognized today. Given the continued prioritization of White female suffering in the American media over stories of Black women’s struggle, the ways in which Black women can discursively utilize sentimentality to gain affective agency and negotiate self-definition in interactional public contexts is of significant sociolinguistic interest.

Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents

AbstractIn 1870, the New York State Suffrage Association published a pamphlet titled “Woman as Inventor.” White suffragists distributed this history of female invention to prove women's inventiveness, countering arguments that biological disabilities justified women's legal disabilities. In the United States, inventiveness was linked to the capacity for original thought considered crucial for voters, making female inventiveness relevant to the franchise. As women could and did receive patents, activists used them as government certification of female ability. By publicizing female inventors, counting patents granted to women, and displaying women's inventions, they sought to overturn the common wisdom that women could not invent and prove that they had the ability to vote. Although partially successful, these efforts left undisturbed the equally common assertion that African Americans could not invent. White suffragists kept the contemporary Black woman inventor invisible, relegating the technological creations of women of color to a primitive past. White suffragists created a feminist history of invention, in words and objects, that reinforced white supremacy—another erasure of Black women, whose activism white suffragists were eager to harness, yet whose public presence they sought to minimize in order to keep the woman voter, like the woman inventor, presumptively white.

Breaking Canons: Intersectional Feminism and Anti-Racism in the Work of Black Women Artists

In this essay, I will argue for the relevance of the visual production of several contemporary black women artists for the shattering of Eurocentric stereotypes and racist and patriarchal narratives, which, as legacies of the colonial and enslaving past, continue to wound the social and psychic lives of non-white people. While envisaging contemporary artistic practice as being in close dialogue with, or located within, other epistemic and cultural practices – such as the disciplinary fields of history and art history, and visual culture at large –, which have produced and reproduced racist discourses and racialized subjectivities for centuries, I will examine the ways in which black women artists break Eurocentric canons and counter racism, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism from within the specific field of contemporary art, in between theory and practice, and drawing on the invaluable lessons of intersectional feminism. Relevant examples will be works by Grada Kilomba (Portugal, 1968), Eurídice Kala aka Zaituna Kala (Mozambique, 1987), and Keyezua (Angola, 1988). This essay will consider the ethico-political valences of such critiques through contemporary art, while not avoiding the problems that are inherent to the ways in which neo-liberal capitalism and white privilege remain structurally at the heart of numerous artistic institutions.

A Contemporary Portrait of Black Women Student Affairs Administrators in the United States

Although Black women are the most represented minoritized group among U.S. higher education administrators, they continue to lag behind White women and men in terms of leadership in the student affairs profession, which may be exacerbated by their relative underrepresentation in graduate programs in education. Further, beyond generalized narratives about the aggregated experiences of Black women in higher education, little is actually known about the status and ambitions of contemporary Black women in student affairs. A secondary analysis of archival data extrapolated from a program evaluation survey provided preliminary insight into the educational and professional characteristics and aspirations of 401 Black women student affairs administrators who participated in the African American Women’s Summit. Findings revealed that the majority of participants had earned master’s degrees, were employed as assistant deans/directors, and were earning between $30,000–$49,999 annually. The most represented student affairs functional areas among participants were Housing and Residential Life Programs, followed by Multicultural Student Programs and Services. Most participants were employed at large, public, 4-year, predominantly White institutions. Further, despite hesitations about enrolling in doctoral programs and persisting in the profession, many participants still aspired to terminal degree completion and senior-level leadership. The data were interpreted in relation to existing research about the career pathways of chief student affairs officers and suggest that more specific strategies are needed to facilitate the promotion of Black women into student affairs leadership positions. While the findings of this study focused on a specific group of Black women student affairs administrators and thus should be applied cautiously, the portrait offered contributes to the scant body of literature about Black women employed in student affairs and suggests interim strategies that may be used to ameliorate their underrepresentation in the field.

“The Laws Have Hurt Me” Violence, Violation, and Black Women’s Struggles for Civil Rights

Black women bore scars of the routine violence that plagued them in the Jim Crow South from girlhood on. Their encounters with state and sexual violence shaped their resistance to white supremacy and the very ways they thought about nonviolence and self-defense. Drawing on works in black women’s and civil rights history, this essay foregrounds women well-known and lesser-known—from North Carolinian Mabel Williams to Mississippi café-owner Henrietta Wright—to explore how their vision of activism emerged from both black political tradition and everyday experience. This history offers context and guide to contemporary Black women activists who continue to challenge state violence as it has evolved and mutated.

Rosana Paulino and the Art of Refazimento: Reconfigurations of the Black Female Body in the Land of Racial Democracy


 
 
 This essay analyzes the historical and aesthetic significance of the visual art project Assentamento(s) (2012-2013) by Rosana Paulino. Her work re- inscribes the black female body into the historical narrative of Brazil, complicating long-established notions of “Brazilianness”. By using art techniques and materials that combine lithography, digital printing, drawing, sewing, video, and sculpting, Paulino develops a multi-layered artistic assembly that she describes as a process of refazimento (“remaking”). Paulino pushes the boundaries of the historical archives, highlighting both the struggles and agency of black women within Brazilian society. I argue that, as a contemporary black woman visual artist, Paulino engages in a method of historical interpretation that Saidiya Hartman defines as “critical fabulation”. My study explores how Paulino’s refazimento represents a method of inquiry that confronts the legacies of Brazil’s racial democracy and its ideology of mestiçagem. Paulino’s visuality reclaims Afro-Brazilian ancestral memory and black female complex subjectivities.
 
 

Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation

AbstractThis essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of “reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth.

Tornar-se mulher negra: escrita de si em um espaço interseccional

Resumo: No artigo visa-se à compreensão de como se articula e quais os efeitos do processo de subjetivação identitário produzido por mulheres negras contemporâneas que narram suas experiências de vida no blog Blogueiras Negras. Para o estudo foram selecionadas narrativas autobiográficas publicadas neste espaço interseccional. A análise parte de algumas chaves de leitura fornecidas por Michel Foucault e de outros(as) autores(as) que se agregam ao pensamento pós-estruturalista. O movimento de tornar-se mulher negra evidencia processos de sujeição e subjetivação que ocorrem através de um trabalho de si que é ético e político. A partir de sua identificação com a negritude e com o Feminismo Negro, as autoras estabelecem outras formas de relacionar-se consigo e com os outros (negras/os e brancas/os), o que vem produzindo novos contornos às relações étnico-raciais brasileiras.

Call for Manuscripts: Contemporary Black British Women's Writing

Call for ManuscriptsContemporary Black British Women's Writing Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Edited by Elisabeth Bekers, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and Helen Cousins This special issue aims to appraise the burgeoning field of Black British Women's Writing in a collection of essays that considers the literary innovations of British women of African and African-Caribbean descent since the 1990s. The issue will highlight the centrality of aesthetic creativity in writing by black British women in order to acknowledge their investments in innovation and their challenges to literary tradition. We invite essays that recognize and celebrate the aesthetic qualities of this writing alongside or instead of the more usual socio-critical investigations, which understand the politics of these texts as a type of sociological information. However, the focus on innovation and experimentation should not neglect the political intent of writing that challenges social, political, and cultural issues. On the contrary, the special issue will be framed by an understanding that literary aesthetics, race, and gender intersect to produce/question particular social and material in/exclusions in specific historical and sociocultural contexts. We welcome essays on the full range of genres (including novels, plays, poems, performance, life writing, essays) that are adopted, and adapted, by contemporary black British women writers. We also seek to draw attention to a wide range of writers, beyond individuals who have gained prominence in recent years; therefore, we encourage contributions discussing authors with developing reputations. Topics might include but are not limited to: • Innovation in literary form, for example, through hybrid cross-genre writing, linguistic play, anti-realism, narrative and structural modes that create fragmentation. • The ways in which the formal experiments of black British women's writing ask challenging questions of society. • The intersection of race and gender with ideas of literary aesthetics in black British women's writing. • How alternative reading practices can open up explorations of black British women's aesthetic innovations. • The effects a critical focus on aesthetics and innovation has on canon formation for black British women's writing and beyond. [End Page 253] • The traditions and norms that limit black British women writers' artistic expression to "authenticity" and cultural representation. Initial queries and abstracts are encouraged though final acceptance will be determined by the completed essay. Essays should be 6,000-9,000 words (excluding notes), should conform to the endnote style of the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and should be submitted as a Microsoft Word document. Please submit essays through email by 1 October 2019 to elisabeth.bekers@vub.be and H.Cousins@newman.ac.uk. [End Page 254] Copyright © 2019 The University of Tulsa

Sexual Variety and Sexual Satisfaction in Black Women: Findings from a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Aged 18 to 83

Relatively little is known, at the population-level, about the sexual lives of contemporary Black women in the United States. Using data from 2015 Sexual Exploration in America Study, a U.S. probability sample aged. 18+, we examined Black women's reports of engaging, or not engaging in, 30+ sexual behaviors as well as their sexual satisfaction. Most (>75%) women perceived sexual variety to be important to relationships and/or marriages. Black women's higher sexual variety scores were associated with greater odds of a high sexual satisfaction rating. Clinical and education implications for Black women's sexuality and their relationships are discussed.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Reviewed by: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis James Arnett POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND THE BLACK FEMALE IMAGINATION, by Kristen Lillvis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 144 pp. $44.95 cloth. Kristen Lillvis's Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination demonstrates how emergent theories of posthumanism and black humanism provide generous new angles through which to look at contemporary African American literature. In this critical work, Lillvis elaborates a genealogy of black women's literature and culture that takes us from canonical neo-slave narratives of the 1980s, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), through the funhouse mirrors of Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, to the works of Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Julie Dash. Ambitiously covering literary, musical, and visual narratives, this text productively periodizes contemporary black women's writing and demonstrates continuities between past-facing and future-oriented narratives. Lillvis's text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures, which we might characterize as Afrofuturist—while acknowledging important critiques of the term—and which urgently calls for an evaluation of literature, culture, and politics of the present as it looks towards an increasingly uncertain future. Lillvis explains in the introductions to the book and to each chapter how contemporary eruptions and flashpoints of racial tension call for a reconsideration of some texts whose scholarly criticism and apparatus has unfairly burdened them, limiting an appreciation of their contemporary applicability and vitality. Indeed, Lillvis's work consistently engages with the weight of literary critical discourse on each of these texts, doing due diligence to situate each within the field of scholarly secondary texts. In the first two chapters in particular, Lillvis strives to bridge the gap between black humanisms and posthumanisms to demonstrate how these artists are "transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters" (p. 6). In her reading of Morrison's Beloved and her more recent A Mercy (2008) in chapter one, Lillvis endeavors to explain the "posthuman liminality" of Beloved and Sethe and how both characters experience "liminal temporalities" in the continuities of past, present, and future in their fraught mother-daughter relationship (pp. 11, 13). In chapter two, Lillvis focuses on the possibility of black-white solidarities in spite of historical and ideological contingencies and violences in Williams. In chapter three, she turns to the fierce theme of reproductive justice and self-narration in Jones's Corregidora (1975) and, in chapter four, the horizon of multiple gendered temporalities and racialized consciousnesses in Butler's Kindred (1979). Chapter five explores the communicative transversality of black womens' relationships in the short fiction of Sheree Renee Thomas [End Page 246] and Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). This final reading points out how, for instance, multiply constituted and temporally and subjectively liminal consciousness is "developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time" (p. 116). Lillvis's stated project—to draw together black humanism and post-humanism into a hybridized and generative "posthuman blackness"—is ambitious; she wants to describe the "boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures [that] enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power" (p. 8). There is great difficulty in preserving the ambivalence between a poststructuralist, posthumanist rejection of binaristic thinking in favor of multiplicities and Lillvis's focus on primarily biological, feminine gendered kinship structures. She acknowledges that there are inherently some difficulties in her project: "locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project" (p. 116). Nevertheless, Lillvis capably situates a Deleuzean posthumanist multiplicity as an evolution of DuBoisian double consciousness and Fanonian triple consciousness (chapter four) and then goes further, implicating Glissant's notion of transversality (chapter five). Perhaps the shortcoming of the work is not in what it fails to do but in what it fails to name itself doing, if that is not too fine a point to make. The productive labor of mothering is the central focus of nearly all...

Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance by Christina Baker

Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance by Christina Baker

Protetores solares, pele negra e mídia em aulas de química

A exposição solar proporciona sensação de bem-estar físico, estimula a produção de melanina e a síntese de vitamina D pelo organismo. As civilizações antigas da África utilizavam base de mamona, extrato de magnólia, jasmim e óleo de amêndoas como protetores solares. Com características de uma pesquisa participante, este estudo teve como objetivo aproximar alunas/os do Ensino Médio de cientistas negras contemporâneas. Os resultados estabeleceram um diálogo sobre as radiações ultravioletas que incidem sobre a Terra pelos raios solares. Pessoas de pele negra representam a maioria da população do Brasil e, ainda assim, a veiculação de comerciais sobre protetores solares apresentam como alvo somente o corpo branco. A/o aluna/o reconhece o fenômeno da estratificação racial da população como construção ideológica realizada por meio de um conjunto de práticas materiais de discriminação racial. Portanto, cabe-nos como professoras/res de Química e sujeitos desta sociedade mediar o discurso que combata o racismo na educação.

The Politics of Belonging: Exploring Black African Lesbian Identity in South Africa

This article explores black African lesbian identity in South Africa and how lesbian women understand belonging. This is a contentious subject matter and is situated within a long history of heteronormativity and homophobia on the African continent, as well as the influences of colonialism and contemporary society. This history of heteronormativity and homophobia, combined with the Civil Union Act that gives South African lesbians and gays formal rights to marriage, has resulted in narratives in which contemporary black African women unravel the contradictions and emotions embedded in their struggles for belonging and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Â

We Got Soul: Exploring Contemporary Black Women Educators’ Praxis of Politicized Care

In this critical case study, I draw on endarkened feminist epistemology and a legacy of politicized womanist care to explore how three contemporary black women educators in New York City public schools enact a spiritual and politicized care rooted in their understandings of the sociopolitical contexts where their students live and learn. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed to reveal a praxis of politicized care characterized by three main components: (1) Soulful and politicized purpose driving high expectations; (2) Building relationships through vulnerability, encouragement, communication, and recognition; and (3) Redefining success and envisioning paths for the future. Examining such praxis provides insight into approaches educators can take to create connections with students that are responsive to their material lives and helps them feel grounded in their educational and professional pursuits.