African American Women's History Research Articles

"Sista Docta": Performance as Critique of the Academy

Before I even open my mouth with these words and drummer Alli Aweusi strikes first PA on djembe, critique of academy has begun. sista docta was created in 1994 as seriate sketches that offer my commentary on being an African American woman professor at predominantly European American academic institutions.' This essay explores ways performance in general, and sista docta specifically, challenges academy's philosophy of inclusion and academy's predilection for print scholarship. By time I speak in sista docta, there has already been drumming, which invokes long history of African American women in academy. That history is a collective biography marked on downside by exclusion, silence, and overt and covert discrimination, and on upside by determination, courage, and achievement. While genre of autobiography explores singularity of experience, autobiography of marginalized peoples often serves as a collective biography, giving name to experiences of many through experience of one.2 In a discussion of Maya Angelou's autobiographical work, Selwyn Cudjoe explains that the Afro-American autobiography, a cultural act of selfreading, is meant to reflect a public concern rather than a private act of selfindulgence (1990:275). African American autobiography as collective cultural

Ideologies of Women's Distinctiveness in Victorian and Postmodern Contexts

Ideologies of Women's Distinctiveness in Victorian and Postmodern Contexts Anne Firor Scott. Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xii + 241 pp.; appendix. ISBN 0-252-01846-X(cl). Faith Rogow. Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. xüi + 300 pp.; appendices. ISBN 0-8173-0671-4 (pb). Kathleen B. Jones. Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women. New York: Routledge, 1993. xü + 265 pp. ISBN 0-415-90643-1 (d); 0-415-90644-X (pb). Peggy Pascoe Ever since the emergence of women's history as an academic field, the study of women's organizations has been one of its staples. Attracted by their voluminous—if often patently self-congratulatory— records, feminist scholars have looked to women's organizations to investigate everything from their strategic uses of separatism to their significance in fostering feminism, female professionalism, and the welfare state, to the relations of race, class, and gender in the institutions they established.1 In Natural Allies, Anne Firor Scott, a founder of the field, sets herself the task of synthesizing more than three decades of specialized researdi into a comprehensible story line that argues that women's associations "lay at the very heart of American sodal and political development" (p. 2). "Constrained by law and custom," Scott writes, "and denied access to most of the major institutions by which the society governed itself and created its culture, [women] used voluntary assodations to evade some of these constraints and to redefine 'woman's place' by giving the concept a public dimension" (p. 2). In the process, women not only developed their own talents but broadened the reach of democracy for everyone by forcing state and federal governments to assume unprecedented responsibiUty for social welfare. The best feature of Natural Allies is the breadth of its research. The book covers aU the usual groups—the antislavery organizations, the Civil War Sanitary Commission, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union— and more, from the Boston Fragment Society (organized in October 1812 and stiU in existence today) to the Kansas Ladies Refugee Aid Sodety. Relying on recent work by scholars of African-American women's history, © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 138 Journal of Women's History Fall Scott discusses a whole range of black women's organizations; buUding on her own research in southern history, she also explores such Uttle-known topics as Confederate women's organizations. Every group that Scott mentions contributed to the creation of pubUc poUtical roles for women.2 As she sees it, women's organizations may have described themselves in the decorous dialect of Vidorian domesticity, but their actions continuaUy pushed them beyond conventional limits. Thus benevolent women of the early repubtic learned "to estabtish an identity independent of husbands" (p. 27), whüe antebellum moral reformers and antislavery activists began "to think about their own restricted legal and social status" (p. 37) and soon "found themselves propelled into politics" (pp. 51-52). After women's involvement in the CivU War raised their sights from the local to the national level, postwar organizations such as the WCTU "stimulated the beginning of what we would now label a feminist consciousness" (p. 85) and municipal housekeepers engaged in a critique of urban-industrial society that marked "a new stage in women's activism, more radical than anything since antislavery" (p. 159). By 1910, the process had advanced so far as "to make woman suffrage inevitable" (see p. 4). Natural Allies has such a progressive tone that it is no surprise that its narrative climax comes in the Progressive period: women, Scott argues, can be said to have virtuaUy "invented" Progressivism. Admiring the multitudinous achievements of women's organizations, she urges us to consider how impossible it is to imagine the United States without the "churdies, orphan asylums, homes for the aged, juvenile courts, playgrounds , libraries, women's colleges, kindergartens, and well-baby clinics" that "we now take for granted, but which were first inaugurated by some women's assodation" (p. 178). Scott is, of course, quite right. By 1920, middle-class clubwomen...

"Ladies First": Queen Latifah's Afrocentric Feminist Music Video

Although they have been featured in a number of newspaper articles, feminist rappers have received sufficient critical attention. Three recent books on rap (Costello and Wallace; Spencer; and Toop) ignore female rappers, and as recently as March 1990, Terry Teachout could proclaim that, not surprisingly, in the world of rap are largely, if exclusively, objects of transient sexual gratification (60). Feminist rappers like Queen Latifah, Yo Yo, Ms. Melodie, Salt'n Pepa, M.C. Lyte, and Roxanne, among others, only belie his pronouncement but deserve close attention because they are a group of African American who are allowed to speak their own words, a situation that Michele Wallace identifies as unusual in popular culture (3). The one exception to the critical neglect of feminist rappers is the work of Tricia Rose who, in Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile, calls for broadening the scope of investigations in our search for black women's voices (128) to include rap. Rose asserts that women rappers are vocal and respected members of the Hip Hop community, and they have quite a handle on what they are doing (109). Queen Latifah's music video Ladies First (which Rose discusses briefly in her article and in her recent book Black Noise [163-66](1)) provides ample evidence to support Rose's claims. By examining Ladies First closely, this article explores issues raised by feminist rap; that is, rap that focuses on promoting women's importance, that demands equal treatment for women, and that demonstrates the need for to support each other. While a feminist politics of entertainment is troubling and ambivalent, there are feminist entertainments such as Ladies First that present the viewer with moments of resistance to dominant exploitative images of women. In its serious exploration and glorification of African American women's history, Ladies First seizes a televisual moment and breaks the continuity of sexism and racism that dominates the music video flow. While Ladies First is neither ideologically pure nor completely consistent, there is a coherence to the images and lyrics that contrasts strikingly only with music videos by male performers, but also with music videos like Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves, performed by Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox. In Franklin and Lennox's video, for example, arbitrary, unconnected, and traditional portraits of undercut rather than strengthen the overtly feminist message of the lyrics. By contrast, the complexity of the lyrics and images of Ladies First refutes the notion that popular culture texts will inevitably and exclusively exploit gender and Afrocentricity (if these concepts even appear at all). Queen Latifah's feminism draws on the patterns of rap to assert the importance of promoting themselves and other women. Rap, like all other forms of popular music, is inherently feminist, but in this genre, as in other popular genres, female performers use specific generic qualities to promote a feminist message. Rap is noted for its emphasis on lyrics, and through the lyrics, female rappers make explicit assertions of female strength and autonomy. Since rap revolves around self-promotion, female rappers are able to use the form without appearing to be unduly narcissistic.(2) In Ladies First, for example, Queen Latifah touts herself as a perfect specimen, and Monie Love (aka Simone Johnson) spells out her professional name, which evokes the paradox of the conjunction of love and money in a capitalistic society. Love's name draws attention to the nature of the music business, which so frequently draws upon the notion of love to make money. These feminist rappers' names make their wry understanding of capitalism clear and should allay any doubts about their awareness of the complexities and ambiguities of their position. Through her name and emphases Queen Latifah draws upon a tradition of African music and culture to make her criticism of sexism and racism. …

Free Mules, Talking Buzzards, and Cracked Plates: The Politics of Dislocation in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, considered apolitical by some readers, is profoundly political in its repeated undermining of hierarchy as an unquestioned mode of perception. Three formal devices in the text highlight this undermining: the free mule story and its chain of associations, the buzzard tale that moves from the inside to the outside of the free mule story, and the novel's pervasive physical imagery. Language that forces readers to juggle multiple and contradictory meanings intertwines with an acknowledgment of physicality — human sexuality, human death — in a powerful display of the limits of rational truth telling. Rooted in African American women's history, the novel confronts the complexities of racism and sexism while undercutting a belief in any monological understanding of person or politics, text or nation.

African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race

PT-P HEORETICAL DISCUSSION in African-American women's history begs for greater voice. I say this as a black woman who is cognizant of the strengths and limitations of current feminist theory. Feminist scholars have moved rapidly forward in addressing theories of subjectivity, questions of difference, the construction of social relations as relations of power, the conceptual implications of binary oppositions such as male versus female or equality versus difference-all issues defined with relevance to gender and with potential for intellectual and social transformations.l Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, this new wave of feminist theorists finds little to say about race. The general trend has been to mention black and Third World feminists who first called attention to the glaring fallacies in essentialist analysis and to claims of a homogeneous womanhood, woman's culture, and patriarchal oppression of women.2 Beyond this recognition, however, white feminist scholars pay hardly more than