Izabella Penier Culture-bearing Women: The Black Women Renaissance and Cultural Nationalism This monograph was written during Marie Curie-Sklodowska Fellowship 2016-2018 (European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant agreement No 706741) Izabella Penier Culture-bearing Women The Black Women Renaissance and Cultural Nationalism Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Language Editor: Adam Leverton ISBN 978-83-956095-4-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-83-956095-5-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-83-956095-6-5 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go 4o http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. © 2019 Izabella Penier Published by De Gruyter Poland Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Language Editor: Adam Leverton www.degruyter.com Cover illustration: https://unsplash.com/@jeka_fe by Jessica Felicio Contents Preface 1 1 Introduction: The Black Women Renaissance, Matrilineal Romances and the “Volkish Tradition” 16 1.1 African Americans as an “Imagined” Community and the Roots of the “Volkish” Tradition 32 1.2 Two Versions of the National “Family Plot”: Black National Theatre and the Historical /Heritage Writing of the Black Women’s Renaissance 40 1.3 The Black Women’s Renaissance and Black Cultural Nationalism: Can Nationalism and Feminism Merge? 53 1.4 Looking at the Black Women’s Renaissance through the Lens of Nation-and- Gender Studies 58 2 Mapping the Black Women’s Renaissance: The Formative 1970s and the Shift from a Black Nationalist to a Black Womanist Aesthetic 66 2.1 Ninety-seventies’ Feminist Social Protest Fiction: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Motherhood 66 2.2 Forging of Black Womanist Aesthetic 74 2.3 The National Family Plot: From the Father of the Nation to the National Mother 78 3 Matrifocal Nationalism, Afrocentric Womanism and the Fear of Disinheritance 89 3.1 Matrtifocal “Literary Ethnography”: The National Mother as a Womanist Theologian 89 3.2 White Feminist and African American Scholarship on Motherhood 94 3.3 Black Matrilineal Romances by African American and African Caribbean Immigrant Female Writers 99 3.3.1 Jamaica Kincaid’s Contestation of the Mother(land) 103 3.3.2 Michelle Cliff’s Clare Savage Novels and Endorsement of the Caribbean Motherland 105 3.3.3 Mother/Daughter Dyad in the Works of Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall 108 3.4 Maternal Legacies: From Mother/Daughter Dyad to Mother/Daughter Bonding 111 4 Kulturnation: The Black Women’s Renaissance, Folk Heritage and the Essential Black Female Matrix 116 4.1 Discursive Practice of Heritage and Nation-building 116 4.2 “The Black Middle-class Hoopla”: Heritage, Cultural Nationalism and Class 118 4.3 The “Spacetime of Heritage” and Black Women’s Renaissance Narratives of Immersion 122 4.4 Black Conjure Women as “Midwives of the ‘National’ Soul” 132 4.5 Womanist Literary Criticism and the Development of “an Essential Black Female Matrix” 134 4.6 The “Essential Black Female Matrix” vs Goals of Black Feminism 141 5 Volknation: The Black Holocaust and the Poetics of the Slave Sublime 146 5.1 Neo-slave Narratives, Memory Work and Affirmation of Negative Heritage 146 5.2 Trauma Studies, the Black Holocaust and Narratives of Redemption 150 5.3 “Blackjewishrelations” and the Politics of the Slave Sublime 153 5.4 Alternatives to the Slave Sublime 160 6 Culturalism, Classism, and the Politics of Redistribution 169 Bibliography 191 Index 211 Preface The idea for this book grew out of my ongoing fascination with cultures of the Black Atlantic and my observation of two apparently parallel phenomena taking place at the end of the 20th century: the Black Women’s Renaissance (BWR) of the United States and the “literary blossoming” (1989 anthology Her True-True Name) of Caribbean female fiction. The BWR began in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s, while the Caribbean blossoming reached its height in the 1980s. As the Caribbean critic Selwyn R. Cudjoe has observed, that rise of diasporic African and postcolonial women’s writing should not be viewed in isolation. The flowering of talent among Caribbean women writers was “a part of a much larger expression of women’s realities that [was] taking place in the postcolonial and civil rights era in the United States” (Caribbean Women Writers 5-6). In other words, these two literary movements came to fruition in the aftermath of the civil rights and feminist struggles of black people in the US and across the entire postcolonial world.1 Admittedly, “Caribbean female fiction” is a very broad term describing authors of different races: Creole women (like Jean Rhys) and mixed-race women (like Michelle Cliff); women writing in different languages (like the very famous francophone Maryse Condé); and women domiciled in different countries, such as France (Condé), the UK (Grace Nichols), Canada (Marlene NourbeSe Philip) or the United States. My study will address Anglophone African Caribbean writers living in the US, such as Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, who were born into the families of Caribbean immigrants and have been integrated into the African American literary tradition, as well as immigrant writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid or Michelle Cliff, who retained their interest in their postcolonial Caribbean motherlands. Due to their residence in the US, these African Caribbean writers were participants in the same black literary culture as African American women writers, and their writing represented a conver- gence of diverse literary traditions. During the BWR, these African Caribbean writers built “inter-American bridges” that helped to “make sense of a common fragmented history” (Coser, Bridging the Americas 4) of black peoples in the Americas. African American and African Caribbean women writers collectively contribu- ted to the flowering of the BWR, but they did not share the same perspectives on blackness and femaleness, even though African American and African Caribbean cul- tures have analogous historical experiences. These cultures share the legacy of the 1 For example, the editors of Wild Women in the Whirlwind, Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nico- la McLaughlin, noticed that the African American Renaissance was a part of a larger renaissance that saw the emergence of Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Barbara Buford (UK), Bessie Head (South Africa) Flora Nwapa (Nigeria) Grace Ogot (Kenya). Carol Boyce Davies argues in “Writing Home” that black women’s writing in the US, the Caribbean and Africa constitutes “various allied traditions” that prove the “ongoing cross fertilization” among writers of the black diaspora (Out of the Kumbla 70-1). 2 Preface Middle Passage and enslavement, but henceforth the historical pattern does not hold. African American writers developed a rich “minority” culture in the country that was gradually growing to become the world’s neocolonial superpower, and their liter- ary tradition was created through dialogue with the white mainstream. The African Caribbean literary tradition, on the other hand, was shaped not just by the experi- ence of slavery but also colonialism, as well as a postcolonial desire to rehabilitate denigrated African cultures. Black West Indians formed the majority in the colonized islands, which were subjected to centuries of imperial hegemony. In these two dias- poric constituencies, descendants of African slaves were part of different imperial/ national mythologies that sought to uproot them: namely, the colonial myth of the benevolent and culturally superior mother country and the American myth of cultural assimilation and economic success. Of these two hegemonic mythologies (the benign mother country and the American Dream), the colonial one apparently turned out to be more disempowering, as Caribbean writing, to a greater extent than African Ame- rican writing, betrays a sense of displacement and historical amnesia. Consequently, these two groups of women writers that made up the BWR held different views on the issues that are the subject of this study: namely, the processes of national, ethnic and gender self-definition. There were, of course, also close similarities between African Caribbean and African American feminist fictions in spite of the cultural, historical and political dif- ferences. Even though, as I will contend, these women writers came to different con- clusions about the meaning of black cultural nationalism, the manner in which they structured the relationship between creative arts, ethnicity and feminism was similar. They were all concerned with the question of how to represent black and female dia- sporic identity in the context of national belonging that was variously defined: as being either a part of the American nation, or the postcolonial motherland, or an ethnic community with a distinctive history and culture. In dealing with these issues, BWR writers produced unique historical and heritage fictions that fused national/ ethnic and feminist perspectives. The most striking feature of that fiction was the writers’ effort to re-write black diasporic histories and redefine black female identities through engagement with their maternal legacies. Their novels, which were in many respects culturally and his- torically distinct, often took the form of a feminist allegory of the daughter’s recup- eration of African maternal heritage. As Caroline Rody has argued in The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History (2001), the BWR practically invented a new subgenre in historical fiction, which she calls the maternal romance, in which black diasporic daughter-writers revisit African peoples’ troubled pasts through their matrilineal connections. Despite differences in authorial tone, African American and African Caribbean daughterly writers shared many concerns and conventions, artistic choices and literary strategies, as reflected in their themes, tropes and motifs, as well as the characterizations, plots, and settings of their novels.