Reading Democracy: Anthologies of African American Women’s Writing and the Legacy of Black Feminist Criticism, 1970-1990 by Aisha Peay Department of English Duke University Date: __________________ Approved: ______________________________ Priscilla Wald, Chair ______________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ______________________________ Ranjana Khanna ______________________________ Kathy Psomiades Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT Reading Democracy: Anthologies of African American Women’s Writing and the Legacy of Black Feminist Criticism, 1970-1990 by Aisha Peay Department of English Duke University Date: __________________ Approved: ______________________________ Priscilla Wald, Chair ______________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ______________________________ Ranjana Khanna ______________________________ Kathy Psomiades An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright by Aisha Peay 2009 ABSTRACT Taking as its pretext the contemporary moment of self-reflexive critique on the part of interdisciplinary programs like Women’s Studies and American Studies, Reading Democracy historicizes a black feminist literary critical practice and movement that developed alongside black feminist activism beginning in the 1970s. This dissertation addresses the future direction of scholarship based in Women’s Studies and African- American Studies by focusing on the institutionalized political effects of Women’s Liberation and the black liberation movements: the canonization of black women’s writing and the development of a black feminist critical practice. Tracing a variety of conceptions of black feminist criticism over the course of two decades, I argue that this critical tradition is virtually indefinable apart from its anthological framing and that its literary objects illustrate the radical democratic constitution of black women’s political subjectivity. The editors of such anthologies of African American women’s writing and black feminist practice as Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970), Mary Helen Washington’s Black-Eyed Susans (1975), and Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1984) articulate the relationship of political praxis to creative enterprise and intellectual activity. In the case of Smith’s anthology, for example, “coalition politics” emerges as the ideal democratic practice by which individuals constitute political identities, consolidate around political principles, and negotiate political demands. Situating anthologies of black women’s writing in relation to the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Reading Democracy explores how black feminist iv projects in the academy and the arts materialized the democratic principles of modern politics in the United States, understanding these principles as ethical desires that inspire self-constitution and creative and scholarly production. Constructing a literary critical and publication history, this dissertation identifies the democratic principles that the anthologies in this study materialize by analyzing them alongside the novels and short stories published during the 1970s and 1980s that they excerpt or otherwise reference, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983). The anthology facilitates the analysis of the single creative work’s black feminist consciousness. Using the critical terms of democratic theory to mark the fulfillment of a political theory of black women’s writing, as Smith first proposed, this dissertation arrives at a sense of democracy as a strategic zone of embodiment and a modern political imaginary forged by the recognition of “the others” in our midst who are coming to voice and are ineluctably constituted by the same ethical desires as are we ourselves. v CONTENTS iv ABSTRACT viii ILLUSTRATION 1 INTRODUCTION Toward a Genealogy of Black Feminist Criticism The Legacies of Black Feminist Criticism 13 CHAPTER ONE 27 Politicizing the Content, Anthologizing the Form: Black Feminism and Radical Democracy Radical Democracy’s Logic of Content 31 The Anthology as Radical Democracy 43 Toward a Radical Constructivist Practice 47 The Appropriation of Democratic Desire 57 CHAPTER TWO 69 The Soul of Subjectivity: Toni Cade Bambara’s Literary Coalitions The Political Community and Radical 86 Democratic Citizenship Social Transformation and the Ecology of the Self 111 Coda 120 CHAPTER THREE 125 “A Wide-Angled Lens”: Black Feminist Historiography and the Textual Image vi The Discursive Tangle of Liberalism 131 The Intervention of Black Feminist Historiography 144 Textual Irreverence and The Bluest Eye 152 CHAPTER FOUR 172 The Diasporic Bridge: Black Feminism and the Politics of Representation Black Transnationalism and the Invention of African American Subjects 177 Black Feminism and the Politics of Intimacy 197 Memorial Africa and Diasporic Desire 206 EPILOGUE 218 The Last Black Feminist Anthology BIBLIOGRAPHY 226 BIOGRAPHY 238 vii ILLUSTRATION Figure 1 87 Diagram of Claybourne, Georgia’s community organizations. In Hull, Gloria T. “What It Is I Think She’s Doing Anyhow: A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters .” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology . Ed. Barbara Smith. 1983. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 132-133. viii INTRODUCTION Toward a Genealogy of Black Feminist Criticism “What is a literary critic, a black woman critic, a black feminist literary critic, a black feminist social literary critic? The adjectives mount up, defining, qualifying, the activity. How does one distinguish them? The need to articulate a theory, to categorize the activities is a good part of the activity itself to the point where I wonder how we ever get around to doing anything else.” Barbara Christian, “Black Feminist Process: In the Midst Of…” in Black Feminist Criticism (1985) The cultural knowledge project known as Black Women’s Studies emerged from the intricate connections among political, scholarly, and creative projects, including black feminist social activism, the study of black women writers, and the activity of black feminist criticism, which black feminist activist-educator Barbara Smith inaugurated in her pamphlet publication “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” in 1977. In that essay, Smith set out to establish a practice for reading black women writers—and especially, black lesbian writers—from a feminist perspective, which, for Smith, presumed the necessity of a political movement that would frame the analysis of black women’s “experience” and foster the development of a black feminist political theory. Such prescriptions for a literary critical practice coincided with what fellow black feminist critic Mary Helen Washington identified as the “renaissance” of black women writers after 1970. This renaissance allowed black feminist critics to identify black women’s writing traditions and canonize under-taught black women writers. In Reading Democracy , I launch a genealogy of black feminist criticism from this nexus of beginnings, questioning what it means to historicize black feminist thought and determining the link between the registers of social movement politics, academic feminism, literary critical practice, and literature that circumscribe Smith’s call for a black feminist political theory. Understanding black feminism as an outgrowth of the 1 sixties movements, when black women activists became black feminists engaged not only in social justice projects for equal rights but also in making black women culturally legible as black women, I understand black feminism to garner its political content from its analysis of political subjectivity. In the connection Smith and other black feminist critics drew between black women’s experience and social movement politics, I gather that by what they called black women’s experience they meant some aspect of black women’s subjectivity. By reading the work of their political theorist-contemporaries, I gather the terms for reading that subjectivity. In the memories of Smith and Beverly Guy-Sheftall about academic feminism and the development of Black Women’s Studies converge two constellations of black women scholars and creative writers. Smith, who was appointed to the Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession in 1974 and became one of the founders of Black Women’s Studies, recalls “a hitherto undocumented chapter in the building of Black women’s studies”: the convening of interdisciplinary salons by black women graduate students studying in Boston in the early 1970s, several of whom had begun incorporating the work of black women writers into their scholarship. 1 In those salons, Smith met Nellie McKay, Claudia Tate, Cheryl Gilkes, Hortense Spillers, Linda Perkins, and Andrea Rushing. On the way to the first meeting at Rushing’s home, Smith encountered McKay, who sensed that they were headed in the same direction, having ridden the same subway. McKay and Smith subsequently remembered their encounter as a metaphor for their intellectual trajectories. As Smith put it, they were 1 Smith, Barbara. “Building Black Women’s Studies.” In The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding