Black Feminist Thought: The Voices of Black Women Writers
As I posted some time ago, Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, will be the keynote speaker at this year's National Women's Studies Association conference held this year in Cincinnati, OH. Below is an excerpt from a section of the aforementioned work entitled, "The Voices of Black Women Writers." Perhaps it begins to tackle the question of whether black feminism is a book movement from a different angle than the one we previously discussed here.
During the summer of 1944, recent law school graduate Pauli Murray returned to her California apartment and found the following anonymous note from the “South Crocker Street Property Owner’s Association” tacked to her door: “We … wish to inform you the flat you now occupy …restricted to the white or Caucasian race only…. We intend to uphold these restrictions, therefore we ask that you vacate the above mentioned flat … within seven days." Murray’s response was to write. She remembers: “I was learning that creative expression is an integral part of the equipment needed in the service of a compelling cause; it is another form of activism. Words poured from my typewriter."
Though a Black women’s written tradition existed, it was available primarily to educated women. Denied the literacy that enabled them to read books and novels, as well as the time to do so, working-class Black women struggled to find a public voice. Hence the significance of the blues and other dimensions of Black oral traditions in their lives. In this class-segmented context, finding Black women’s writing that transcends these divisions among written and oral traditions is noteworthy...
Since the 1970s, increased literacy among African-Americans has provided new opportunities for U.S. Black women to expand the use of scholarship and literature into more visible institutional sites of resistance. A community of Black women writers has emerged since 1970, one in which African-American women engage in dialogue among one another in order to explore formerly taboo subjects. Black feminist literary criticism has documented the intellectual and personal space created for African-American women in this emerging body of ideas. Especially noteworthy are the ways in which many Black women writers build on former themes and approaches of the Black women’s blues tradition and of earlier Black women writers.
Do we view writing as simply passive resistance? Do we not find the transformative power of the written word significant? Is pen to paper or fingers to keys still not "active" enough? Thoughts?
Jaya started this discussion 1 year ago. ( )
