Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- PART I PIONEERS AND PROTOFEMINISM
- PART II CREATING A FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Literary representations of women
- 7 A history of women's writing
- 8 Autobiography and personal criticism
- 9 Black feminist criticism
- 10 Lesbian feminist criticism
- 11 Men and feminist criticism
- PART III POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND
- Postscript: flaming feminism?
- Index
- References
9 - Black feminist criticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- PART I PIONEERS AND PROTOFEMINISM
- PART II CREATING A FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Literary representations of women
- 7 A history of women's writing
- 8 Autobiography and personal criticism
- 9 Black feminist criticism
- 10 Lesbian feminist criticism
- 11 Men and feminist criticism
- PART III POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND
- Postscript: flaming feminism?
- Index
- References
Summary
What is generally understood to be black feminist criticism is a body of critical and creative work written by women of African descent in the United States. While black feminisms have arisen in other sites of the African diaspora, for example, in Europe and Latin America, the United States has been the site of the most sustained black feminist critical discourse. Contemporary black feminist criticism came into being in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fostered by the Civil Rights Movement and developed in conjunction with the Second Wave of American feminism, which was dominated by white women, and the Black Power and Black Arts movements, which were dominated by black men. Late twentieth-century black feminist critics and writers, like their white counterparts, have been invested in the connections between their present-day analyses and those of their foremothers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in other words, establishing a sense of continuity between black women's struggles and critical approaches to literature and culture in previous eras and in the present has been a foundational concern. Furthermore, a major thematic and structural element of black feminist criticism, from its roots in the era of slavery to the present, has been its simultaneous attention to multiple oppressions and multiple categories of analysis. From Frances Beale's concept of ‘double jeopardy’ (1970) – the conjoined effects of racial and gender discrimination – to Kimberlé Crenshaw's ‘intersectionality’ (1989/2000) – a more complex model of the ways in which black women function as a nexus at which several forms of discrimination work together – black feminist critics have articulated the layered effects of racism and sexism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Feminist Literary Criticism , pp. 154 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
References
, and (eds) (1997), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Awkward, Michael (1988/2000), ‘Appropriative Gestures: Theory and Afro-American Literary Criticism,’ reprinted in Napier (2000).
(1989), Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women's Novels, New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
(1995), Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
(1984), Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A., Jr(1987/2000), ‘In Dubious Battle’, reprinted in Napier (2000).
Beale, Frances (1970), ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female’, in Cade (1970).
and (eds) (2001), Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
and (eds) (1990), Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
(1987), Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2001), The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(1980), Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
(1985), Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, New York: Pergamon.Google Scholar
Christian, Barbara(1987/1990), ‘The Race for Theory’, in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. and , New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Christian, Barbara(1990), ‘ “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something”: African-American Women's Historical Novels’, in Braxton and McLaughlin (1990).
(1990), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, London: HarperCollins Academic.Google Scholar
Combahee River Collective (1977/1981), ‘A Black Feminist Statement’, in Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981).
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989/2000), ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, in James and Sharpley-Whiting (2000).
(1994), Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1998), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
(1994), Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
(2003), Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1993), The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(1993), Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr (1987/2000), ‘“What's Love Got to Do With It”: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom’, reprinted in Napier (2000).
(ed.) (1990), Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, New York: Meridian–New American Library.Google Scholar
(1984), When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
(1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hammonds, Evelyn (1994/2002), ‘Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality’, reprinted in Wallace-Sanders (2002).
Henderson, Mae G. (1991), ‘Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text’, in Spillers (1991).
, and (eds) (1982), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press.Google Scholar
(1998), The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Joyce, Joyce A. (1987a/2000), ‘The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism’, reprinted in Napier (2000).
Joyce, Joyce A.(1987b/2000), ‘ “Who the Cap Fit”: Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’, in Napier (2000).
Joyce, Joyce A.(1993–4/2000), ‘The Problems with Silence and Exclusiveness in the African American Literary Community’, reprinted in Napier (2000).
(ed.) (1972), Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, New York: Vintage-Random.Google Scholar
McDowell, Deborah (1980/1994), ‘New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism’, reprinted in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
and (eds) (1981), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
(1992), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York: Random House.Google Scholar
(ed.) (2000), African American Literary Theory: A Reader, New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
(1995), ‘Doers of the Word’: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880), New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2004), Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)becoming the Subject, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
(2003), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy, New York: Picador.Google Scholar
See, Sarita (2002), ‘ “An Open Wound”: Colonial Melancholia and Contemporary Filipino American Texts’, in Vestiges of War 1899–1999: The Philippine–American War and Its Aftermath, ed. and , New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Barbara (1977/1982), ‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’, in Hull, Scott and Smith (1982).
(ed.) (1983), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
(1998), Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings, New York: Routledge.Google ScholarPubMed
Spillers, Hortense J. (1987/2003), ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, in Spillers (2003).
(ed.) (1991), Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
(2003), Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
(1992), Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(1998), Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(1983), In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
(ed.) (1989), Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
(ed.) (2002), Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(ed.) (1975), Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women, Garden City, NY: Anchor.Google Scholar
(ed.) (1980), Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers, Garden City, NY: Anchor.Google Scholar
(ed.) (1987), Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960, New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Wynter, Sylvia (1990), ‘Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the “Demonic Ground” of Caliban's “Woman” ’, in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. and , Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.Google Scholar