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This chapter provides context for the following chapters by surveying the scene in which Black feminist writers like June Jordan, Alice Randall, Danielle Evans, and Gloria Naylor came to work through the universities and other institutions that published, reviewed, taught, challenged, censored, anthologized, and archived their work. It details Black women writers’ difficult position within the racial regimes of the long war on terror by chronicling their incorporation into mainstream literary culture. It reflects on the way Black women writers imagine safety beyond state defense, arguing that their invention of insurgent grammars of safety provides us with an analytic through which we can better understand their work in the contemporary era beyond the language of genre and generation.

This essay maps the geographic and thematic locations of Black women’s life stories. It expands the cartography of Black women’s memoirs and autobiographies by tracing writing throughout the diaspora and situating Black American women’s writing within a larger tradition of disparate scribes and griots. The chapter outlines parameters of initial life-story genres, including enslavement survival narratives; moves through cornerstone storytellers, such as Maya Angelou; and situates publications during the civil rights and Black Power eras within contexts of Black writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Latin America. Even though the specific focus remains on autobiographers in the United States, the chapter also highlights emergent themes and patterns to more clearly trace intellectual traditions and connections of Black women writers.

This chapter examines the first writings of black women about girlhood during the antebellum era, with particular emphasis on the trope of the self-reliant black girl in the face of adversity. After reviewing representations of black girlhood in early American children's print culture, the chapter turns to some of the first short stories and full-length books by black women that centered on the lives of black girls. Focusing on the work of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Maria W. Stewart along with an abolitionist text imported from England, it considers how black women writers distinguished between youthful girlhood and knowing girlhood to challenge the prevailing attitude on southern plantations that black girls were valuable solely for their future fecundity and economic potential. By revealing the qualities and behaviors exhibited by black girls across literary genres, black women writers showed that black girls were capable of seeking their own fate.

This chapter begins with a brief analysis of the sexual and racial politics of the Life Always antichoice billboard campaign. It argues that black women writers' participation in what might be considered pornographic industries promotes a form of guerilla warfare, whose objective is to protect and secure women's erotic sovereignty and reproductive freedom. While funk and porn have each been hystericized as the province of men, funk is also viewed as an affective technology that can sustain reciprocal interactions that would improve the lives of women and, in the end, the men and children in their lives. The chapter shows how the way women pursue the terms of their liberation underscores the radical possibilities of what it means to desire versus to be an object of desire, and to create versus to produce.

For the black female subject in the New World, the separation between the sexual and the spiritual had to be maintained within the framework of black women's historical subjugation, not just physically, but more significantly, sexually. Therefore, the central challenges for black women writers have revolved around the issue of how to represent black female characters as both sexual and spiritual beings while working within the constraints of a discursive tradition that historically maligned black women as sexual deviants. The discussion here foregrounds the interrelatedness of identity, autonomy, sexuality, and spirituality in black women's writings. It argues that spiritual processes are necessary for subject formation, and highlight the spiritual practices, perspectives, and theories that inform black female subjectivity, agency, and autonomy.

This chapter explores Paulette Nardal’s triumvirate of gender (“women students”), geography (“Paris”), and nation (“metropolis”) and how it operates in her work as well as in that of her U.S. contemporary Jessie Redmon Fauset. In her 1932 essay “Eveil de la Conscience de Race” (“Awakening of Race Consciousness”), Nardal, a Martinican intellectual, argues that the construct of gender is as important as geography and nation in the articulation of racial identities. This chapter considers how—or why—Paris serves as a narrative, social, or personal catalyst for Nardal’s and Fauset’s respective autobiographical and fictional personae. It examines the role of Paris in Fauset’s African American women and highlights the French city as an instrumental modernist crossroads where black women writers such as Nardal and Fauset negotiated intersecting categories of identity both in their own lives and in those of their characters. It also discusses how African diasporic intellectuals incorporated gender into their understandings of modern black identities in ways that challenged the masculinism of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude.