Search Results

As participant in a 1991 literary symposium conducted by The Women’s Review of Books, Henderson discusses literature, criticism, and theory. (Addressing the relationship between theory and practice, Henderson defines her strategy as thematizing theory and theorizing theme in her readings of black women’s writing. Her goal is not only to use theory as a means of grounding practice and practice as a means of building theory, but also to create sites of struggle and resistance to dominant practices. The theorizing critic, argues Henderson, must always bear in mind the relationship between literary and social practices, establishing connections not only within texts (intratextuality) and between texts (intertextuality), but between the world and the text. Henderson addresses issues such as the value of poststructuralist/deconstructive criticism, the role and commitment of the intellectual, the relationship of black feminism to the feminist, racial, and postcolonial critique, and the future of black feminist studies.

This chapter historicizes and theorizes the sexual and commodity fetishization of the black female body/booty in multiple historical and contemporary “scientific,” economic, and cultural venues and markets, including American slavery, European colonialism, modernist primitivism, and hip-hop video culture. Focusing on the “(mis)performance” of the “video vixen,” whose presence in popular culture has undoubtedly served to (re)define black female bodies in the contemporary cultural imaginary, the chapter compares the performance of the “video hottie” with that of her forebears, Saartjie Baartmann (the “Venus Hottentot”) and Josephine Baker (the “Ebony Venus”), examining the staging of the black female body as spectacle, commodity, and fetish on the antebellum auction block, as ethnographic spectacle in nineteenth-century Europe, and as model/dancer in contemporary hip-hop musical video. It concludes by issuing a call to contemporary black feminist scholars to bear critical witness to the video vixen’s “performance of testimony” to the history imprinted on the black female body.

This chapter constitutes a personal and critical retrospective on the life and work of Sherley Anne Williams, acknowledging claims the poet, novelist, critic, and playwright as Henderson’s “critical muse”—one whose artistic production became the inspiration for much of the author’s critical work. Like her own muse, Bessie Smith, Williams, author of The Peacock Poems and Someone Sweet Angel Child, was a musician who sang the blues as tribute and testimony to the black oral tradition. For Henderson, Williams’s fiction and poetry become sacramental expressions of a secular blues ethic and aesthetic. In addition to her landmark novel, Dessa Rose, arguably representing the inaugural moment of the modern “neo-slave narrative,” Williams published a notable collection of critical essays entitled Give Birth to Brightness. Williams wrote about ordinary women (“Tell Martha Not to Moan”) who become extraordinary in their ability to live through and transcend difficult and painful experience.

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.

In response to Houston Baker’s “There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing,” the chapter expands Baker’s self-professed autobiographical “metalevel negotiations” to the plane of “multi-metalevel negotiations” in black women’s writing. Critiquing the controlling function of the visual in Baker’s poetics, it maintains that the gaze—even the felicitous gaze—relegates women to the status of object. Cautioning Baker against privileging the dominance of the scopic drive implicit in his focus on “imagistic fields,” the chapter proposes that black feminists disrupt the white/ male gaze in the embrace of a range of black female subjectivities and experiences, an approach that would include not only the “felicitous images” proposed by Baker, but more aversive or ambivalent images as well. Finally, Henderson cautions black male theorists who would appropriate black women writers against the dangers of essentializing or totalizing, and thereby reinforcing conventional or stereotypical constructs of black femininity.

This book concludes with an essay from Mae G. Henderson originally published in 1996, which explores the tensions between Black Studies and Black Cultural Studies. She begins by noting the similarities between the two projects. Black Cultural Studies “continues the Black Studies project in that it takes as its object of investigation the consequences of uneven economic, social, and cultural development.” Moreover, “like Black Studies, cultural studies challenges received and conventional disciplinary paradigms in the construction of knowledge through its multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus.” Both schools, too, privilege “the study of vernacular and mass culture.” In short, “many, if not most, of the central concerns of black cultural studies have been anticipated by the Black Studies project and the challenge it brought to the academy two decades ago.”

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple revises the traditional English epistolary novel, a form invented by men writing about women. This chapter argues that both author and her women characters, Celie and Shug, work to transform the traditionally patriarchal and oppressive institutions of literature, religion, and family. On a formal level, Walker subverts white and male literary codes and conventions; on the level of plot and theme, she rewrites the codes and conventions that dominate social and sexual relations. Also emphasized is the importance of popular culture (blues), material culture (quilting and sewing), and folk culture (conjuring)—forms that represent the female bonding achieved through collective labor.

Taking its title from the preface to William Styron’s controversial 1970s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sherley Anne Williams’s “Meditations on History” problematizes the relation of literary author to historical subject/object; the relationship of fiction to history; the relationship of private to public; and the relationship of oral to written discourse in her representation of the relationship between female slave rebel, Dessa, and her -interviewer-author, Adam Nehemiah. Through what Henderson describes as “narrative insurgency,” Dessa inserts herself into a dialogic of call and response. Not only does Williams introduce the black vernacular in order to write the voice of the illiterate slave into history, but she counters the “technology of representation” embodied in Nehemiah’s The Work with Dessa’s “working the rites of roots.” Just as Dessa displaces Nehemiah’s formal discourse with her vernacular voice, so the author seeks to challenges the power of white and male discourse with her privileging of orality.

To overcome the assumption of internal identity(homogeneity) and repression of internal differences (heterogeneity) in reading black women’s literature, this chapter proposes a theory of interpretation based on the “simultaneity of discourse” and “discursive diversity”— signifying the unique ability of black women writers to enter into contestorial and testimonial and discourse with black men, white women, white men, and black women. This tradition is dialogic and interlocutory in that it privileges “otherness” by giving voice to the Other(s) within the Self. Drawing on Bakhtin and Gadamer, the chapter develops the notions of discursive difference (heteroglossia) and identity (glossolalia) while reconstructing the scriptural notion of “speaking in tongues,” a term specifically linked with the practices of the black Holiness Sanctified Church, as a theoretical concept that is culturally specific to a black and female literary tradition. The chapter concludes by proposing that black feminist critics are charged with the hermeneutical task of interpreting tongues.

Opening with a prologue on Collen Stan’s narrative of sexual bondage, a cautionary tale reflecting slavery’s social and discursive legacy, this chapter introduces Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose. As an intertextual novel, Dessa Rose addresses the issues of authorship and representation in Pauline Réage’s Story of O and William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. Rewriting the representation of women and blacks at the scene of writing captivity when the condition of black and/or female subjectivity is repression or subordination, Dessa Rose problematizes Styron’s performance of (black) masculinity and Réage’s performance of (white) femininity by transposing elements of servitude into a narrative of eroticism and elements of the erotic into a narrative of slavery. Deconstructing these novels, Williams opens up a space for the black female, marginalized in Styron’s text and subsumed under the category of (white) woman in Réage’s text. In the epilogue, Henderson challenges readerly subjection to textual mastery.

Silence and its opposite, speech, are primary attributes of the short stories comprising Gayl Jones’s White Rat. In Pinteresque fashion, Jones’s stories resonate with the plenitude and paucity of language in human relationships in the modern world. Her stories thematize and formalize silence as a stratagem reflecting the breaks and discontinuities in the connections and bonds between individuals. These silences are at times expressed by a recalcitrant refusal to speak and, at other times, by an eruption of speech displacing or veiling that which is often unsaid. The dialectic of silence and speech found in the title story “White Rat” also figures in stories featuring characters who harbor secrets and stage confessions. Left without clear resolution in typically open-ended stories, Jones’s characters rarely experience transcendence. Rather, they inhabit liminal zones of ambiguity, borderlands between speech and silence, reality and fantasy, reason and madness. Jones’s story-telling techniques often frustrate conventional notions of narrativization.

This chapter focuses on the responsibility of the teacher/ scholar who would read and represent the “Other” without re-inscribing a tradition of cultural dominance and appropriation. Addressing the pedagogical problematics of invoking black women’s writing and experiences historically and materially to ground the studies of blacks and women in the academy, it asks how does the conscientious teacher-critic avoid the twin pitfalls of fetishization and commodification? Moving beyond the issues of cross-racial and cross-gender appropriation, the chapter addresses the dangers of appropriation when the teaching/writing subject shares a gender- and race-specific identification with the subject taught/ written, posing the query, “What does it mean to teach [and write] the Other when the Other is the Self?” In response, it suggests that the teacher-critic can work against the risk of totalizing or essentializing the subject by embracing a dialogic of speaking and listening and (re)presenting the self as embodied text.

Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh review or simple inattentiveness can provide lubrication to the conveyor belt into oblivion. Addressing, in particular, the responsibility of the academic book reviewer, it focuses on the fate of black and women authors whose works have been subject to criticisms of exceptionalism, inauthenticity, trivialization—or, worse, subject to neglect or suppression. Proposing that the reviewer attend to issues of power, positionality, and process (the power of the review, the positionality of the reviewer, and the process of reading), the chapter explores the viability of alternative models for reviewing, especially as these address the politics and ethics of women reviewing women. The protocol it recommends entails what can be described fundamentally as a dialogic process of “critical conversation” between reviewer and author.

Reviewing the critical reception and scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing, the chapter documents the historical and contemporary appeal of the “passing plot” in US fiction, along with the social phenomenon of race passing. Like the slave narrative, the passing novel is structured by border crossings and functions as a form of social critique. And while, like many modernist texts, Passing focuses on the theme of identity, Larsen rewrites essentialist notions of identity with the postmodernist concept of performative identity. The chapter proposes that Larsen, in effect, narratively theorizes the postmodern debate around essentialism vs. constructionism, challenging the idea of innate racial difference while embracing an ideology of racial uniqueness. Juxtaposing central characters Clare, who embodies textual performance, and Irene, who embodies readerly performance, the chapter demonstrates how these miscegenous figures represent “a crisis of representation.” Larsen’s achievement, it concludes, lies in her reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position.

Baker’s parodic stage performances enacted scenarios in which audience and performer participated, the former compelled by a powerful voyeurism, the latter by an equally powerful exhibitionism, creating a dialectical performance reenacting the obsessive need of the colonizer to “look” and the obsessive desire of the colonized to be “looked at.” Locating Baker within a tradition of ethnographic display, the chapter compares the staging of the Baker body with that of the African pavilions at the world fairs and colonial expositions. However, as sites of the French civilizing mission, Baker’s performance of métissage, like the mingling of architectural representation, transgressed the Manichean logic of racial difference that distinguished primitivism from modernism, savagery from civilization, African from European. Baker’s “performance” of the primitive, the chapter concludes, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain an argument of racial difference when the “performance” of primitivism threatens constantly to deconstruct the “essence” of the primitive.

Juxtaposing André Levinson’s French colonial reading of Baker’s performance with e. e. cummings’s American postcolonial reading, the chapter argues that while both acknowledge the powerful phallicism of Baker’s performances, each reading nonetheless functions to spectralize and dismember the subject. If Levinson’s reading functions to disembody and de-materialize the subject, then cummings’s reading functions to fragment or dismember her. Together, they read Baker through the lenses of the French colonial and American postcolonial imaginary. The chapter seeks to disrupt these discursive frames of reading, re-locating Baker’s dance performance within the context of diaspora. Baker’s dancing, it argues, was both an identity-constituting performance and a signifying system capable of a politics of resistance, manifesting the potential to unsettle the (post)colonial gaze and, thereby, to disrupt the dominant and hegemonic discourse. The chapter concludes that because Baker’s performances inevitably risk reproducing gender and race stereotypes, they possess the power and potential to be simultaneously transgressive and recuperative.

This chapter offers a memorial retrospective of novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, drawing on the parallels between the author’s and the critic’s common backgrounds and experiences. In novels such as Your Blues Ain’t Mine, Singing in the Comeback Choir, Brothers and Sisters, What You Owe Me, and 72-Hour Hold, Campbell’s subject, broadly speaking, is the modern condition and the human condition—not universalized and flattened out, but read through the complex lenses of race, gender, and class, as these categories intersect to shape individual lives in a society dominated by corporate, mass, and popular culture. Campbell provides what the great cultural critic Kenneth Burke describes as “literature as equipment for living.” Campbell’s novels address the social and psychic challenges and conflicts facing those who seek to live principled and accountable lives, informed by a sense of social justice and an ethic of care.