Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter I: The Black Feminist Movement: “Refusing Encompassing Definitions”

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter I

Cultural and Theoretical Contexts:

Rewriting, Revision, and Black Postmodernism

The Black Feminist Movement: “Refusing Encompassing Definitions”

Black postmodernism cannot be fully understood without taking into account African American feminism and gender studies. In the 1970s, the increased development of black women’s liberation movement becomes part of a larger social movement centered on women.¹³ African American women’s double critique of racism and patriarchy is rooted in the double exploitation of black women throughout history—as women and as black persons. African American scholars have noted that a major difference between black and white feminists lies in the middle class focus of the white movement. While white women’s middle class position has offered them at least material comforts, black women have suffered since the times of slavery physical and mental hardships quite unknown to white women.¹⁴

In theory, the motivations of black and white women are the same, consisting in the eradication of oppression. However, in practice, their aims are distinct: on the one hand, “women of color generally have sought broad institutional transformation in the dismantling of policies, practices, and structures that perpetuate oppression on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender;” on the other hand, “white women generally have sought to gain access to male power structures and then to transform gendered hierarchies from the inside” (Grant 2005, 4). Laying emphasis on difference, black feminists thus “refused all-encompassing definitions of the black community or the black man or the black woman” (McKay and Gates 1997, 2016).

The social and political agenda of the 1970s was later expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, when feminists centered on issues of race, sexuality, and class. These feminists` message is present in literary masterpieces (Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, and others) and theoretical works (Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Thadious Davis, bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Mae Henderson, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense Spillers, Mary Helen Washington, and others). Moreover, the publication of anthologies contributes to the institutionalization of black women in the literary canon: The Black Woman (ed. Toni Cade Bambara), Invented Lives (ed. Mary Helen Washington), The Black Woman Writer (ed. Mari Evans), and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (ed. Gloria Hull).

Black feminists’ main concern now addresses the necessity to rewrite the former literary tradition, to reexamine the official history for what is missing, miswritten, or absent, in order to move away from objectified representations of femininity and produce an “alternative history/story for which woman must be newly imagined as pluralized subject” (Spivak 1993, 282).¹⁵ In his introduction to Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. underlines that the critical effort must be able to “resurrect, explicate, and canonize the Afro-American women’s literary inheritance” (1990 b, 7). In a double process of rediscovery and revision, African American female authors rewrite key moments of women’s experience, being in search of black female genealogies. Hence, their aim is to disrupt and transcend the male-centered patterns of thinking by producing new racial and gendered definitions.¹⁶

Barbara Smith’s trailblazing essay (first published in 1977), “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” is part of the earliest attempts to formulate the black feminist aesthetics of (re)reading black women’s literature. Smith is aware that in works by black women “the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors” (1982, 159). Moreover, Smith draws attention to the existence of an ongoing black female tradition, which should be analysed both at the thematic and stylistic level.¹⁷

Smith’s concern for the black female tradition is also shared by other critics, including Barbara Christian, Alice Walker, and Houston A. Baker—who have dealt specifically with the imaginative connections between various generations of female authors.¹⁸ Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers builds upon the idea that African American women’s writing represents an identifiable female tradition (1985). In this direction, her book discusses black female authors from the nineteenth century (Frances Harper) and twentieth century (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker), whose central aim is “sharpening a vision that overthrows the old white male elitist-centered view of the universe” (1985, 162).¹⁹

This significance of redefining experience by identifying a black female genealogy is also emphasized by Alice Walker. Her famous book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, proposes that Western concepts of creativity should be expanded to include “unacknowledged female artifacts of ‘everyday use’ such as gardens and quilts” (1983, 137). Defining a womanist aesthetic that documents women’s personal awareness and growth, Walker pins down in the diversity of black women’s writing a “unifying theme, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and public world” (1983, 5). She also stresses the primary role of female models that enrich the perspective of each writer, and consequently underscores the connection between reading and writing:

It has been said that someone asked Morrison why she writes the kinds of books she writes, and that she replied: Because they are the kind of books I want to read… To take Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read (1983, 7, 13).

Importantly, male voices have not been excluded from this process of gendering African American theory. Walker’s idea of a matrilineal tradition is also present in Houston A. Baker’s Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of the Afro-American Women’s Writing. In a trasdisciplinary dialogue in which photographs of black women interact beautifully with comments on works by Hurston, Morrison, and Shange, Baker makes clear his intention not to offer a historical account of certain texts, but a “poetic adherence” that considers those works that are “spiritually resonant” (1991, 204). The power of female writings “is derived… from their returns upon a suppressed lineage of creative mothers and grandmothers,” which makes use of folklore, magical realism, jazz, and vernacular crafts (1991, 205).

Unlike such critics as Harold Bloom, whose controversial book The Western Canon reads the literature of the past by “taking into account the fundamental terms of European identity” (Irimia 1998, 468),²⁰ black feminists have contoured their theoretical perspectives by moving away from Eurocentric or male-centered views. Their attempts to circumscribe an ongoing female tradition indicate an anxiety of non-influence that permeates the black women’s many-layered writing. Their works become textual quilts—“essentialized forms of the accumulated experience of several female generations” (Cri�u and McArthur, 2004). To borrow from Showalter, textual quilting turns into a “creative manipulation of conventions,” and an instrument of crossing literary borders (1986, 228).

NOTES

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