Audre Lorde

  • Identity/location-lesbian and poet, mother, partner-“other”
  • Died in 92 of breast cancer
  • Poetry published in the late 1960s
  • Active in civil rights and feminist mvmts
  • Critique of intolerance of difference in black communities
  • Homophobia/outsider
  • Looks at un-neutral Difference-Derrida
  • Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference
  • There are real differences
  • Not differences that separate us
  • It is the refusal to recognize difference and examine the distortions that result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation (WOF, 285)
  • Our goal is to extract these distortions once we recognize them
  • we need to reclaim and define them and explore them-not pretend they don’t exist-leads to isolation or false connections
  • Need to deal effectively with the distortions that have resulted from ignoring and misnaming those differences
  • Need to develop tools for using human difference as a “springboard” for creative change-speak of human difference, not deviance-relate across differences
  • Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (291)-must tear down old structures of oppression-we can’t be opprssors while tearing down oppression-must remove that piece of the oppressor implanted deep within us
  • Deconstructs “the mythical norm”-white, male thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian and financially secure
  • Trappings of power reside here
  • Those outside usually identity one way they are different and assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing
  • Looks at the entanglement of race, class and gender with production-for instance, those who can be artists are those who can afford the pricey supplies for producing art
  • Black women’s literature is the “fabric” of our lives-stitched with violence and hatred
  • Bodies
  • Critiques the practice of constriction-girdles, high heels and hobble skirts (286)
  • Racial difference
  • White privilege in the academy
  • White women don’t see black women as women-their work is absent b/c it is “incomprehensible”-incomprehensible b/c don’t see them as women (287)
  • Instead see them as familiar stereotypes
  • Others become outsiders
  • Internal move
  • Differences between black folk
  • Threatening-suspect (288)
  • Need for unity often misnamed for homogeneity
  • Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal
  • Violence against women (“women-hating acts”)
  • Sexual hostility practiced against black women by all men, including black men-exacerbated by silence, racism and powerlessness
  • Standard by which manliness measured
  • Difference between black women
  • Many ingredients to one’s identity (289)-multiple aspects, not equaling the whole
  • Don’t want to live within the restrictions of externally imposed definitions
  • Embracing the whole allows for one to be of service to the struggles one embraces
  • Heterosexism
  • Homophobia
  • Both work to discount the existence and work of black lesbians-unworthy of attention and support
  • Self
  • Must recognize internalized patterns of oppressions and root it out
  • External
  • Lowest paid wage earners
  • Primary targets of abortion and sterilization abuse
  • a

Barbara Smith

  • theorist/activist/lesbian
  • emerged in the 1970’s
  • coedited all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave-fisrt black women’s studies anthology
  • path breaking essay, “toward a black feminist criticism”-defined black feminist literary criticism and underscored the importance of sexuality in reading black women’s literature (fire, 253)
  • taught one of the first black women’s writers classes in the academy at Simmons college in Boston
  • “Some Home Truths on the Contemporary Black Feminist Movement”
  • Addresses sexual politics at “home”-within the black community
  • Says there is a need for heterosexuals to understand their own heterosexuality in order to address “heterosexual panic” regarding lesbians and gays
  • Definition should not begin by attacking everybody who is not heterosexual (259)
  • Multi issue approach-simultaneity of oppression
  • Political reality-most significant ideological contribution
  • Everything kicking our behinds-no need to rank oppressions (260)
  • Coalition building-teaming up with those that cn possible kill you-is one way of figuring out how to stay alive (261)
  • Looks at what oppression is comprised of on a day to day basis
  • Identity
  • Growing black and female
  • Thought there ws something fundamentally wrong with her because everyone who looked like her was held in such contempt (262)
  • By the cold eyes of white teachers, yells of black men from cars as she and her sister stood waiting for the bus
  • Sexism and racism had formed the blueprint for black women’s mistreatment before she was born (Butler/Fanon)
  • The hated of others’ became self hatred
  • Black feminism helps us to know we didn’t do anything wrong to be treated this way
  • Provides the theory for black women’s experiences and encourages political action that will change the very system that has put us down (womanist may make suffering sufferable as Marx said-explore)
  • Not just about developing theory-about day to day organizing
  • Issues addressed
  • Reproductive rights
  • Equal access to abortion
  • Sterilization abuse
  • Health care
  • Child care
  • The rights of the disabled
  • Violence against women
  • Rape
  • Battering
  • Sexual harassment
  • Welfare rights
  • Lesbian and gay rights
  • Educational reform
  • Housing
  • Legal reform
  • Women in prison
  • Aging
  • Police brutality
  • Labor organizing
  • Anti-imperialist struggles
  • Anti-racist organizing
  • Nuclear disarmament
  • Preserving the environment (263)
  • Coalition with women/and other ethnicities (Hall)
  • Transnational feminisms (Tracy)
  • Looks at the flourishing of cultural work (265)
  • Literature
  • Music
  • Visual arts
  • All being redefined from feminist perspective
  • Want visions to be made real in permanent form (265)
  • Concerned with publishing-discourse/power
  • a
  • a

who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as an innovative critic, teacher, lecturer, author, independent scholar, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities over the last twenty five years. Smith’s essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Nation.

n 1975 Smith reorganised the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization to establish the Combahee River Collective. As a socialist Black feminist organization the collective emphasized the intersectionality of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of Blacks and other women of color. Additionally, the collective aggressively worked on revolutionary issues such as “reproductive rights, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women’s movement,” explains Beverly Guy-Sheftall in her introduction to Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-Feminist Thought. After working for the National Observer in 1974, Smith committed herself to never again being “in the position of having to make [her] own writing conform to someone else’s standards or beliefs,” (Smith, 1998).

Smith’s article “Toward a Black Feminist Consciousness” (1982), first published in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But some of Us Brave: Black Women’s Studies is frequently cited as the breakthrough article in opening the field of Black women’s literature and Black lesbian discussion. She has edited three major collections about Black women: Conditions: Five, The Black Women's Issue (with Lorraine Bethel), 1979; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell Scott), 1982; and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (first edition, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983; second edition, Rutgers University Press, 2000).

“What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you. I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before,” (Smith as cited in Hill Collins, 2000).

Mary Helen Washington, (Giddings)

  • Literary criticism
  • Cultural exploration of the world, realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860-1960 (back)
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Frances Harper
  • Pauline Hopkins
  • Fannie Barrier Williams
  • Marita Bonner
  • Dorothy West
  • Nella Larson
  • Ann Petry
  • Harriet Jacobs
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Makes black women’s literature present-these writers have been dismissed (by male historians and literary workers) as “sentimentalist”and rediscovered and reevaluated by feminist critics (see Gates’ work) (xx)
  • Ignored by mainstream American literature in ways Ellison’s Invisible Man was not (xvii)
  • Their literature is about black women, their thoughts, feelings, words, experiences, deeds
  • A good source for interpreting what is like being black and female (what did Tracy say about lit?)
  • Texts intertwine female intimacies, violence, sexuality, social justice-rape, lynching, reconstruction, class distinctions, discrimination-no romantic heroines-all of these women work (xxii)
  • Women’s writing considered singular and anomalous, not universal and representative (see Crenshaw)-writing about black women not considered as racially significant as writing about black men (xix)
  • With the exception of a handful of autobiographical narratives from the nineteenth century, black women’s realities are virtually suppressed until the period of the Harlem Renaissance and later
  • , a

Michele Wallace,

  • teaches women’s studies and film studies
  • “black macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” (1978)
  • A critique of the male dominant civil rights and misogynisitic Black Power movements and a scathing expose of sexual politics within the African American community (Fire, 219)
  • Also debunks the myth of the black woman as “superwoman” who have no need for feminism
  • Because black women are supposedly already liberated since they are heading families, working outside of the home, building lives independent of men, unsheltered or pampered (Smith, 255)-confuses liberation with the fact that black women had to take on responsibilities that our oppression gives us no choice but to handle
  • Black women faced with limited choices regarding the circumstances of their lives (265)
  • Ability to cope under the worst conditions is not liberation-spiritual capacities have made it look like a life
  • Poverty, unequal pay, no child care, violence of every kind including battering, rape, and sterilization abuse does not translate into liberation
  • The myth of “towering strength” that undergirds this myth is dehumanizing-makes it seem as if we don’t feel or need
  • “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist Search for Sisterhood”
  • Wrote in response to backlash for black macho-even from black feminists
  • Race traitor
  • Defining blackness
  • Could finally be herself (221)
  • Discarded beauty tips from Glamour magazine
  • No more make up, garter belts, high heels, stockings, girdles
  • Becoming someone-not something
  • New found freedoms stripped of her through the movement
  • What was free became a demand (afro)
  • Black masculinity used to silence and control
  • “The message of the black movement was that I was being watched, on probation as a black woman, that any signs of aggressiveness, intelligence, or independence would mean I’d be denied even the one role still left open to me as ‘my man’s woman,’ keeper of house, children, and incense burners. (222)-consequence-being alone!-eagerly grabbed at own enslavement
  • blackness now becoming the new slavery (223)
  • black women told it was counterrevolutionary to do anything other than having babies (no education or work) (224)
  • s
  • a
  • a

Michele Wallace is a feminist author and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. She became famous in 1979 when, at age 27, she published Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman, a book in which she criticized black nationalism and sexism. She is professor at City College, New York.

Feminist scholar / cultural worker / intellectual Michele Wallace has been furthering the difficult work of decolonization since her first brave and controversial book "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman" appeared in 1979, when Wallace was twenty six. She was attacked, like Ntozake Shange, for her refusal to be reticent about the corrosive and painful effects of sexism and racism on Black women. As she commented in her interview in Marlon Riggs' "Black Is, Black Ain't", she is still, in many ways, being punished. Wallace's exemplary critical writing on visual art is cogently presented in such essays as "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture" and her afterword in the book Black Popular Culture. (based on a pathbreaking conference organized by Wallace at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1991), "Why Are There No Great Black Artists? The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture". Her attention to the invisibility and/or fetishization of Black women in the gallery and museum worlds has made possible new critical thinking around the intersection of race and gender in African-American visual and popular culture, particularly in what she has called "the gap around the psychoanalytic" in contemporary African-American critical discourse. Presently, Wallace teaches in the English Department at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY).

Below you will find a link to a hypertext bibliography of Wallace's work, and we hope to reproduce written work by Wallace in the future.

bell hooks,

Valerie Smith,

Wahneema H. Lubiano,

Wahneema Lubiano's rich cultural criticism insists on reading African-American literature and Black popular cultural production not just as a series of "texts", but as living instances of Black expressive techniques forged in African diasporic, post-slavery cultures. Her attention to and interrogation of Black Studies and cultural studies as fields of knowledge results in a criticism that explores the tension between "strategic essentialism" and its foes. In maintaining what bell hooks has called "a touch of essentialism", Prof. Lubiano's work demands a politics of representation, spectatorship, and audience formation that remains attached to the material experience of Black spectators and readers. Prof. Lubiano has kindly permitted us to post her bibliography, to which regular additions will be made. Pending permission , a number of her essays will be reproduced at this site.

*

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies(Ph.D., Stanford, 1987). Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, New Engladn Quarterly, among other publications. She is author of the forthcoming books Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions, and editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996). Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, womens' studies, black intellectual history, and nationalism.

Hortense Spillers, and

  • literary critic
  • Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition
  • different mode of critical "tradition," akin to the mode Hortense Spillers calls for in the afterword to Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985): "Tradition" as "an active verb, rather than a retired nominative" (260). By way of such an interpretive mode, Tate depicts the discontinuities, as well as the commonalities, both within the developing tradition and within individual writers' works as they are historically conditioned by shifting political contexts
  • black women’s right to write and create own tradition (see article)

Spillers, Hortense J. (born 1942)

  • Literary critic, cultural theorist, and professor. Spillers is one of the most innovative and challenging African American literary critics working in the U.S. academy today. Her groundbreaking essays and articles have openly but cautiously incorporated poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial critique into analysis of literary and social texts in the African diaspora. Students of African American literature and culture have benefited from the sheer inventiveness of Spillers's cross‐disciplinary critical vision. Yet in light of the astounding breadth of her scholarship, Spillers remains grounded in feminist theory and criticism and, correlatively, defends locally situated, site‐specific critical protocols (seeFeminist, Black Feminist Literary Criticism).
  • a
  • “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
  • Describes the experience of an enslaved African American female who shares the conditions of all captive flesh…(xi)
  • Living laboratory
  • For such women, the theft and mutilation of the body create a singular condition in which gender difference is lost-becomes territory (see page below)
  • Body
  • Diasporic plight marked a theft of the body (BFR, 60)
  • Severing the captive body from its motive will and active desire
  • Lose gender difference under these conditions female and male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender related, gender-specific
  • Captive body captive to imposed meanings and uses
  • Source of irresistible destructive sensuality
  • At the same time reduced to a thing-a being for the captors (Fanon)
  • Object and thus, sexuality provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”
  • As a category of “otherness” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human and social meaning
  • Makes a distinction between “body” and “flesh”
  • Central distinction between captive and liberated subject-positions
  • Flesh
  • Bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside (61)
  • Unprotected
  • Ungendered
  • All procedures on the captive flesh
  • Unethical
  • Total objectification-living laboratory (medical) (63)
  • Body
  • a
  • a
  • a

HORTENSE J. SPILLERS