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Karla Kovalova (ed.)
Black Feminist Literary Criticism

Black Feminist

Since its inception, black feminist liter- fields. The volume contains an introduc-
ary criticism has produced a number of
sophisticated theoretical works that have
challenged traditional approaches to
tion by Cheryl A. Wall, and essays by Karla
Kovalova, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, and
Nagueyalti Warren.
Literary Criticism
(black) literature. This collection of essays
explores past and current productions
of black feminist theorizing, attempting The Editor Past and Present
to trace the trajectories in black feminist Karla Kovalova holds a Ph.D. in Modern
criticism that have emerged in American History and Literature with emphases in
scholarship since the 1990s. Taking black African American and African studies and With an Introduction
feminist literary criticism as the subject
of inquiry, the book focuses on the field’s
Women’s studies from Drew University
(USA). She teaches at the English Depart-
by Cheryl A. Wall
recent theoretical contributions to literary ment of the University of Ostrava, Ostrava
productions and their impact on other (Czech Republic).
ISBN 978-3-631-66758-3
Kovalova 266758_HOF_A5HCk PLE.indd 1 15.02.16 KW 07 13:04


Black Feminist

Since its inception, black feminist liter- fields. The volume contains an introduc-
ary criticism has produced a number of
sophisticated theoretical works that have
challenged traditional approaches to
tion by Cheryl A. Wall, and essays by Karla
Kovalova, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, and
Nagueyalti Warren.
Literary Criticism
(black) literature. This collection of essays
explores past and current productions
of black feminist theorizing, attempting The Editor Past and Present
to trace the trajectories in black feminist Karla Kovalova holds a Ph.D. in Modern
criticism that have emerged in American History and Literature with emphases in
scholarship since the 1990s. Taking black African American and African studies and With an Introduction
feminist literary criticism as the subject
of inquiry, the book focuses on the field’s
Women’s studies from Drew University
(USA). She teaches at the English Depart-
by Cheryl A. Wall
recent theoretical contributions to literary ment of the University of Ostrava, Ostrava
productions and their impact on other (Czech Republic).
Kovalova 266758_HOF_A5HCk PLE.indd 1 15.02.16 KW 07 13:04


Past and Present
With an Introduction by Cheryl A. Wall

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in
the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic
data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kovalova, Karla, 1974- editor.
Title: Black feminist literary criticism : past and present / Karla Kovalova
(ed.) with an Introduction by Cheryl A. Wall.
Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047205 | ISBN 9783631667583
Subjects: LCSH: American literature--African American authors--History and
criticism--Theory etc. | American literature--Women authors--History and criti-
cism--Theory etc. | American literature--20th century--History and criticism--
Theory etc. | Feminist literary criticism--United States. | African American wom-
en--Intellectual life. | Feminism and
literature--United States. | Women and literature--United States.
Classification: LCC PS153.N5 B5534 2016 | DDC 810.9/928708996073--dc23 LC
record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047205
The book is an outcome of the project no. 13-26975S-Black Feminist Literary

Criticism, financed by the Czech Science Grand Foundation.
ISBN 978-3-631-66758-3 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-653-06373-8 (E-Book)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-06373-8
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Frankfurt am Main 2016
All rights reserved.
Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH.
Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙
Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
www.peterlang.com
To all the brave women
[P]eople of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the
Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and
I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in
the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since
dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. […] My folk, in other
words, have always been a race for theory – though more in the form of the hi-
eroglyph, a written figure that is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and
communicative. (Barbara Christian)
[O]ne can discern the extent to which what was once a male-dominated enterprise
has been dramatically qualified by female African American theorists, who have
emerged in such numbers and with such influence that they are arguably the
major force in fin de siècle African American literary culture. (Winston Napier)
I […] resist attempts to map black feminism along a linear trajectory. […] [B]lack
feminist discourses speak to multiple audiences simultaneously and across history.
[…] Rather than reading black feminism as an evolution from reactive critique
to recuperative, literary archeological projects, to “theoretically sophisticated”
interventions, we might thus understand it to be a series of overlapping, discon-
tinuous, and multiply interpretable discursive sites. […] I prefer the formulation
“theorizing black feminisms” to the descriptive and monolithic category “black
feminist theory.” (Valerie Smith)
Afro-American literary discourse is not now nor has it ever been monolithic;
however, what has been consistent within the explicit and implicit terms of that
discourse […] is a concern with the relations of power and with social and eco-
nomic history. (Wahneema Lubiano)
This, then, is at the heart of what contemporary African Americanists Michael

Awkward, Jr, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Mae Henderson, Wahneema Lubiano, Debo-
rah McDowell, Hortense Spillers and Cheryl Wall have made evident in their
respective works: a commitment to read back and forth between literature, cul-
ture and theory, never presuming that one should wholly explain the other, nor
expecting from what direction any explanation should derive. (Yun Hsing Wu)
Table of Contents
Karla Kovalova
Preface...........................................................................................................................11
Cheryl A. Wall
The Writer as Critic in the Emergence
of Black Feminism.......................................................................................................17
Nagueyalti Warren
Home Girls and Sister Outsider: The Roots of Black Feminist
Literary Criticism........................................................................................................29
Karla Kovalova
New Directions and Contradictory Impulses: The Development
of Black Feminist Literary Theory.............................................................................57
Karla Kovalova
Literary Tradition and Black Aesthetics Revisited:
Black Feminist Approaches to African American Literature
in the Twenty-First Century......................................................................................85
Heike Raphael-Hernandez
From White Gaze to Black Female Resistance: Street Lit and
Popular Cultural Productions in Black Feminist Theorizing............................. 113
Karla Kovalova
Blackness and Whiteness Within and Without the U.S. Context:
Pushing the (National) Boundaries of Black Feminist Literary Criticism........ 133
Karla Kovalova
Afterword.................................................................................................................. 157
Note on Contributors............................................................................................... 159
Select Bibliography................................................................................................... 161
Index.......................................................................................................................... 173
Preface
Karla Kovalova
In her recent poetry collection The New Black (2011), Evie Shockley crafts a poem
in memory of Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Sherley Anne Williams, Bar-
bara Christian, Claudia Tate, June Jordan, and Nellie Y. McKay to pay homage to
women who, despite having lost their battle with cancer, left a tremendous legacy.1
As artists and scholars, they channeled into their work love, courage, and beauty,
insisting on the transforming potential of literature. Each of these women holds
a special place among the founding mothers of black feminist criticism.
This volume has grown out of respect for the scholarship of these women as
well as those whose writing continues in line with their legacy. Its genesis can be
loosely linked to three events. Event One: In 2006, within its section on “Theories
and Methodologies,” PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of
America, published ten essays by prominent feminist scholars addressing the issue
of the relevance of feminist criticism in the twenty-first century. Titled “Sympo-
sium: Feminist Criticism Today: In Memory of Nellie McKay,” the selection of
essays paradoxically failed to include a black feminist scholar’s perspective on the
issue under examination.2 Instead, it featured an interview with McKay, the late
pioneering black feminist critic, recording her memories about the past life of
black feminist literary criticism: the emergence of black literature in the academy,
and the establishment of black women’s literature in the canon. This oversight
left an unanswered question: what is a black feminist response to the issue of the
relevance of feminist literary criticism in the twenty-first century?
Event Two: The following year, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
published Farah Jasmine Griffin’s essay “That the Mothers May Soar and the
Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Liter-
ary Criticism.” In this essay, Griffin reviews the production of black feminist
literary criticism, noting that by the mid-1990s it had become “one of the most
intellectually exciting and fruitful developments in American literary criticism.”3
1 Shockley, Evie: The New Black. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 2011, p. 12.
The title of the poem is “good night women (or, defying the carcinogenic pen).”
2 “Symposium: Feminist Criticism Today: In Memory of Nellie McKay.” PMLA 121(5)
2006, pp. 1678–1741.
3 Griffin, Farah Jasmine: “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know
Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism.” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 32(2) 2007, p. 484.
12 Preface
Although she admits that it has experienced a backlash, she argues that black
feminist criticism in the twenty-first century continues to offer a useful mode of
analysis and strategy of reading, and that many scholars are continuing to expand
the field. Her words resonate in Event Three. In 2010, Differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Studies published Ann DuCille’s essay “The Short Happy Life
of Black Feminist Theory,” which returned to the question of black feminist lit-
erary criticism in the new millennium.4 Arguing that its “short happy life” in
academia may have ended in the latter part of the 1990s, the essay demonstrates
that as a mode of analysis and a strategy of reading, black feminist criticism has
lost none of its strength and potential, and that there are still new paths to take,
new trajectories to chart.
This volume attempts to trace the trajectories in black feminist criticism that
have emerged in American scholarship since the late 1990s, focusing on the field’s
theoretical contributions to American and English literary production and their
impact on other disciplines. Its aim is not to present an exhaustive, comprehensive
list of all the trajectories in or theoretical contributions of black feminist literary
criticism; clearly, this would be beyond the scope of a project such as this.5 Instead,
the volume aims to provide space for exploring, in a more coherent and compact
way, scholarship that deserves to be treated as a subject of inquiry in the form of
a book-length publication.
Since its inception, black feminist criticism has produced a number of
sophisticated theoretical works that have challenged traditional approaches to
(black) literature as well as assumptions about the canon, the concept of tradition,
narrative conventions, and more. Scholars have taken note of these works, yet their
writing about black feminist literary-theoretical production has been limited to
individual essays, reviews, summary chapters/entries in encyclopedic volumes of
African American literature, introductory pages in collections of essays, readers
and anthologies related to American literary criticism, and summary chapters/
entries in volumes about black feminism, black literary theory or feminist literary
theory. While this scholarship is significant and provides an excellent overview
of the field’s theoretical production, it needs to be expanded. This project hopes
to do just that.
4 DuCille, Ann: “The Short Happy Life of Black Feminist Theory.” Differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21(1) 2010, pp. 32–47.
5 The volume is an outcome of a research grant awarded to the editor who had to comply
with the rules of the grant-awarding foundation (hence the format of the volume and
the greater number of essays written by the editor).
Preface 13
On this note, several clarifications should be made. As is evident from DuCille’s

essay and the scholarship on black feminist criticism, the boundaries between
black feminist criticism and theory are very porous; often the terms are used in-
terchangeably. The contributions in this volume testify to this fact. However, they
also make clear that their focus is on black feminist theorizing, i.e. on theoretical
models/paradigms that can be applied to literature (and, by extension, to extra-
literary genres). Also, the editor is aware that black feminist production cannot
be limited to scholarship produced solely by black women. However, to make
the project manageable, the present volume had to be limited to the theoretical
production of U.S. black (i.e. African American) women only.
In order to understand the present, one has to know the past. The volume
opens with an introduction by Cheryl A. Wall, “The Writer as Critic in the Emer-
gence of Black Feminism,” which explains how black women writers have been
fusing the role of artist and critic in their work, while raising important theoreti-
cal issues. As Wall contends, this fusion is “a defining element in the develop-
ment of black feminist criticism,” a field that, from its inception, took fourth
paths: 1) recuperation of lost and forgotten artists and texts, 2) textual analysis
of black women’s writing, 3) cultural analysis focusing on the contexts in which
art, both literary and non-literary, was produced by black women, and 4) a turn
to diaspora.
Wall also highlights how the theory and praxis of black feminist criticism is
premised on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as interrelated fac-
tors in black women’s experience. This intersectionality was first theorized in the
writing of Barbara Smith, a black lesbian feminist critic who, together with Audre
Lorde, changed the face of black women’s literary criticism. This is the argument of
Chapter I, “Home Girls and Sister Outsider: The Roots of Black Feminist Literary
Criticism,” in which Nagueyalti Warren examines the roots of black feminist criti-
cism and argues that the works of radical lesbian feminists have enabled others
to confront openly and honestly the diverse experiences of black women and to
critique in writing what marginalized women have said and have written. As War-
ren notes, black feminist literary criticism might have developed in an entirely dif-
ferent direction had it not been for the lesbian voices calling for an end to silence
and challenging black women critics to embrace a new way of seeing/reading.
In Chapter II, “To Use or Not to Use ‘the Master’s Tools’: Black Literary Criti-
cism as a ‘Locus of Contradictions’ Then and Now,” Karla Kovalova returns to
Lorde’s proverbial statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the
master’s house” by exploring black feminists’ attempts at negotiating the political
and ethical implications of the use of Western theory. Using Barbara Christian’s
“The Race for Theory,” Joyce A. Joyce’s “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black
14 Preface
American Literary Criticism,” and Hortense J. Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s

Maybe: An American Grammar Book” as a springboard for her discussion, she
exposes black feminist literary criticism as “a locus of contradictions,” a site of two
seemingly opposing trajectories: one requiring the promotion of African-centered
concepts and thus the utter rejection of the “master’s tools,” the other insisting
that the enemy must be beaten “at his own game,” thus promoting a subversive
use of Western theories. Kovalova identifies the subversive use of psychoanalysis
as a particularly productive recent site of discussion about black subjectivity and
racial melancholia.
Chapter III, “Black Aesthetics and Literary Tradition: Black Feminist Theo-
rizing in the Twenty-First Century,” examines how the claim of the centrality
of the vernacular tradition in black literature has shaped black feminist critics’
approaches to black literature and their theories about the African American liter-
ary tradition. Examining a number of recent theoretical productions by Cheryl
Wall, Emily Lordi, Evie Shockley, Madhu Dubey and Mae Gwendolyn Henderson,
Kovalova demonstrates how these scholars revise prevailing paradigms of black
aesthetics and redefine the boundaries of the black literary canon. While they
may have moved away from the original narrow focus on black women’s fiction to
discuss black literature written by both men and women, they retain their gender
focus as well as their belief that they should take their cues from writers. Attending
to the diversity of their voices, they are able to theorize aspects of new black aes-
thetics that speak to the contemporary moment of the so-called post-racial world.
Chapter IV, “From White Gaze to Black Female Resistance: Street Lit and
Popular Cultural Productions in Black Feminist Theorizing” by Heike Raphael-
Hernandez, discusses black feminist critics’ theoretical responses to urban fic-
tion or street lit, a highly controversial African American literary genre that has
emerged since the 1990s. As Raphael-Hernandez notes, this genre poses a chal-
lenge for black feminist critics because, being interested in the discourse on gender
identity and race, the writers seem “to allow a possible positioning into earlier,
well-established Black feminist literary theories.” On the other hand, however, the
positioning does not seem possible due to the specific ways in which the writers
focus on class and generation. Chapter IV explores the connections between the
new hip-hop generation’s black feminist theorizing and street lit produced by
black women writers, and shows how the concept of the gaze can be “utilized as
an affective tool and strategy for interventions in cultural and social controversies.”
Last but not least, in Chapter V, “Blackness and Whiteness Within and Without
the U.S. Context: Pushing the (National) Boundaries of Black Feminist Literary
Criticism,” Kovalova argues that the publication of Toni Morrison’s seminal book
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (1992) helped push black
Preface 15
feminist literary criticism’s boundaries beyond the realm of black U.S. literature
to encompass productive explorations of other textual territories. Discussing the
scholarship of Valerie Babb, Kim F. Hall, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Ann DuCille
and Karla FC Holloway, she demonstrates how these explorations contributed
not only to a growing body of scholarship on the construction of whiteness in
both U.S. and U.K. contexts, clarifying the historical connections between the two
countries in terms of racial ideologies/formations and white hegemony, but also
to new studies of blackness/race and racial subjectivity/identity in these contexts.
The volume ends with a brief Afterword which summarizes the discussion on
trajectories in black feminist criticism that have emerged in American scholar-
ship since the late 1990s, and points to further trajectories and scholarship that
deserve critical examination.
Note on terminology
Unless stated otherwise, throughout this collection of essays the terms African
American and black are used interchangeably. I have respected the contributors’
preferences for the spelling of the word black as either “Black” or “black.”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) for the grant that allowed
me to pursue the idea of this book and financially supported it. I am equally grate-
ful to my Dean, Ales Zaricky, and my Chair, Andrea Holesova, who granted me a
sabbatical semester despite a temporary shortage of staff in our department. It was
during the six months in Spring/Summer 2015 that I did most of my research and
writing. I thank all my colleagues who suffered the consequences of my absence.
I am also greatly indebted to my esteemed international colleagues Cheryl A.
Wall, Nagueyalti Warren, and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, whom I have met over
the years on various occasions at CAAR (Collegium for African American Re-
search) conferences, for their willingness to contribute to the project. My special
thank-you goes to Professor Cheryl A. Wall, for her invaluable advice on sources
during our meeting at Rutgers; to Professor Nagueyalti Warren, for all the email
exchanges and the depth she brought to our CAAR 2013 panel on Black Feminist
Literary Criticism; and to Professor Heike Raphael-Hernandez for all the wonder-
ful ideas about what the volume could be like (had it not been for the limitations
imposed by the grant).
I am deeply grateful to Lisa Groger, Professor Emerita of Gerontology at Mi-
ami University, for her idea that I consider doing research at Miami University
16 Preface
Library, and to Jerome Conley, Dean of Miami University Libraries, for allowing
me to do that. I am equally grateful to Linda F. Marchant, former Director of the
Honors Program at Miami University, who kindly provided me with office space
and the most positive working environment I could think of. A big part of the
environment were the wonderful members of the Honors Program team—Pam,
Annie, Zeb, Dave and Elise—it is to Elise in particular that I extend my thanks.
A special thank-you also goes to Tammy Kernodle, Professor of Musicology at
Miami University, for all her valuable insights about the special relationship be-
tween black music and literature.
During the time that I worked on my chapters, I had the great fortune to discuss
some of my ideas with many people. I thank all who listened, read drafts, and
offered valuable comments. In particular, I thank Geraldine Smith-Wright, Pro-
fessor Emerita of English at Drew University, for her wisdom, support and trust.
I also wish to express my deep gratitude to Ute Winkelkoetter from Peter Lang
for her enthusiasm about the project and her kind co-operation and patience,
making sure the project sees the light of day. I am equally grateful to all the people
from my home university who helped solve administrative problems, and to my
colleague, Chris Hopkinson, for his meticulous proofreading.
Finally, my biggest thanks go to my family, especially to my husband and my
daughter. For everything.
Cheryl A. Wall
The Writer as Critic in the Emergence

of Black Feminism
“What did it mean to be for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmoth-

ers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is a question with an answer cruel
enough to stop the blood.”1 Alice Walker’s classic essay “In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens” pivots on this query. Structured as a search for her artistic precursors,
the essay identifies the writers Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen, whose work
was just being discovered in 1974, and the poet Phillis Wheatley, whose name was
well-known but whose work garnered little respect. The paucity of literary artists
prompts Walker to search for artists in other genres, music for example, and she
pays tribute to the great blues singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. However,
she insists that women in her grandmother’s generation whose names are not
recorded had the talent and motivation to be artists as well. Reflecting on the
obstacles in their path, she asks the question above. In response, she considers
the “crazy saints,” the female characters Jean Toomer draws in the first section of
Cane, the amalgam of poetry and prose he published in 1923. Walker describes
these characters drawn against the landscape of the rural South as “exquisite but-
terflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era, a century, that
did not acknowledge them except as “the mule of the world.”2 When she cannot
find their real-life contemporaries, she decides she needs to look closer to home.
In a gesture that now seems inevitable but was then utterly unexpected, she
singles out her mother, whose love of beauty was so profound and whose garden-
ing skills were so exacting that, Walker writes, “even my memories of poverty are
seen through a screen of blooms – sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia,
spirea, delphiniums, verbena... and on and on.”3 Walker locates poetry and prose
in a genealogy of black women artists including writers and singers, quilters and
gardeners, the last group exemplified by her mother Minnie Lou Walker. As
her daughter describes her, Mrs. Walker in her garden is an artist “ordering the
1 Walker, Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In: In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1983, p. 233.
2 Ibid., p. 232.
3 Ibid., p. 241.
18 Cheryl A. Wall
universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.”4 She is the writer’s
artistic as well as biological precursor.
Along with essays including “Looking for Zora,” “One Child of One’s Own:
A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s)” and “Saving the Life that is One’s
Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” “In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens” helped define black feminist criticism. These pieces charted three of
the four paths black feminist critics would pursue over the next four decades: 1)
recuperation of lost and forgotten artists and texts, 2) textual analysis of black
women’s writing—past and present, and 3) cultural analysis focusing on the con-
texts in which art, both literary and non-literary, was produced by black women.
The fourth path took the turn to diaspora, a crucial shift that has been ascendant
in the twenty-first century.
The theory and praxis of black feminist criticism is premised on the inter-
sectionality of race, gender, and class as factors in black women’s experience. It
answers another question that was commonly posed in the 1970s: are you black
first or a woman first? Most black women could not answer this question, because
their racial and gendered identities were inextricably bound together. They were
always both. As black people, black women were subject to the forces of racism.
As women, black women were subject to the forces of sexism. More black women
than not were poor, and were consequently exploited as a consequence of their
class position. These oppressions did not occur sequentially; they were continu-
ous and overlapping. Black feminist criticism analyzes the ways they intersect
in black women’s lives. The legal theorist and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw
introduced the term intersectionality in 1989, but its roots were sown in black
women’s literature and criticism in the 1970s.
Alice Walker is not unique in the double role she played as both artist and critic.
That fusion of roles is a defining element in the development of black feminist
criticism. Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and
Ntozake Shange are poets and writers who come immediately to mind.5 Their
dual roles are neither antithetical, nor self-serving. Their art and their criticism
exist in reciprocal relation. At times the art is the basis of critical insights, as for
example in the case of Mem, a character in Walker’s first novel The Third Life of
Grange Copeland, whose commitment to beauty even in the face of poverty could
make her one of the mothers whom Walker the critic is searching for. At other
4 Ibid., p. 241.
5 This list is not exhaustive. I should note two obvious omissions: Toni Morrison and
Sherley Anne Williams, who do not identify as feminists, but are of course significant
writer/critics. Their essays influence many explicitly feminist critics and scholars.
The Writer as Critic in the Emergence of Black Feminism 19
times, artists create characters and situations depicting the new world order they
theorize in their critical essays. Fiction after all need not depict life as it is; it can
depict life as it should be.
By choosing to focus on artist-critics, I do not intend to minimize the impor-
tance of scholars who have defined the field of black feminist criticism. I am one
of them, after all, and our contributions are discussed in detail throughout this
volume. Neither do I contend that black women writers are unique in shaping
the critical context in which their writing would be received. To do so would
ignore the roles played by Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Ralph
Ellison in the critical reception of modernism, to take just one historical case.
Still, the African American women who came into print during the last quarter
of the twentieth century reflected on their artistic practice with unusual clarity.
Their ideas on the particular position of black women in the United States strike
common chords, and their nonfiction writings point to common challenges fac-
ing them as artists.
In this preface, I lay out a few of their shared critical concerns and discuss
the ways those concerns are anticipated, explored, and occasionally resolved in
their poems and fiction. Some of these concerns were explicitly literary: In what
tradition did their writing belong? Were there models from which to draw? Were
they better off without models? In what language would African American writ-
ers speak? In what language would their critics speak? Some concerns were not
literary at all: rather they engaged issues that black women collectively confronted.
If black women writers asked common questions, they came up with different
answers, both in their criticism and in the literature they produced. Their liter-
ary voices constitute a chorus, as Toni Cade Bambara once put it, in which each
writer sings her own solo. Their literary signatures are as distinctive as those of
their musical peers. Just as no one who has ever listened to Nina Simone mistakes
her for Aretha Franklin—even when they are singing the same song—no careful
reader would mistake Toni Cade Bambara for Alice Walker, or June Jordan for
Audre Lorde.
The year 1970 was pivotal. Both Toni Morrison and Alice Walker published
their first novels, The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, respec-
tively. A few months before, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou’s
now classic autobiography, had appeared. Each of these books demonstrated how
the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, and class threatened the lives of the
young girls at their center. In the two novels, the characters were destroyed, but
in Angelou’s autobiography, the protagonist survived and at the book’s conclusion
was poised to soar. These writings looked back to a past when black women in the
United States had “no say,” as the literary theorist Mae Henderson phrased it. That
20 Cheryl A. Wall
is, their words and thoughts counted for nothing on the public record; no official
documentation of their words and thoughts existed. But within their homes and
communities they had had plenty to say, and a new generation of literary artists
sought to recall and re-imagine their words.
Grange Copeland is the title character of Walker’s first novel, which depicts
three generations of a sharecropping family in rural Georgia. His son Brownfield
carries on his line, but the novel’s most memorable characters are female. Grange
beats his wife Margaret and humiliates her by having a public affair with a pros-
titute named Josie. Initially Brownfield seems determined to lead a different life
by marrying Mem, a schoolteacher who strives to bring beauty inside their home
and in the gardens she plants. But her efforts are thwarted when Brownfield is
pulled back into the dehumanizing system of sharecropping; he takes out his
subsequent rage on his wife and children. Mem resists the degradation imposed
by the system and by her husband, who unable to live up to her expectations,
or his own, murders her. Their youngest daughter Ruth represents the third
generation, and Grange’s love for her gives him the “third life” to which the title
alludes. Young and vulnerable as she is, Ruth is a truth-teller, whose courage
and integrity allow her to resist Brownfield in ways that her mother could not.
Still, she cannot overcome his patriarchal authority. Her grandfather Grange,
finally able to confront his own wrongdoing, intervenes, and by killing his son,
liberates his granddaughter.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland is difficult to read because of the seemingly
unrelenting racism, poverty, and domestic abuse it depicts. But it is worth reading
because of the skill with which it shows how these conditions are inextricably tied
to one another. Racism, sexism, and economic exploitation feed off each other.
They create a physical and psychological prison from which no escape seems
possible. Yet, in the end, Walker’s vision is hopeful. Grange’s transformation is
proof that even the cruelest abuser can be redeemed. Ruth’s participation in the
emerging Civil Rights Movement at the end of the novel demonstrates that even
the most oppressive social systems can be overturned.
Also in 1970, Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara) edited The Black Woman,
an anthology that brought together a chorus of voices including those of the
poets and writers Nikki Giovanni, Verta Mae Grosvenor, Paule Marshall and
Sherley Anne Williams, along with the political activists Frances Beale, Grace
Lee Boggs, Joanne Grant and Pat Robinson, who compiled the working papers of
a collective of poor black women. Bambara drew no line between art and activ-
ism, either in the anthology or in her life. Rather than as an artist, she preferred
to identify herself as a cultural worker. As she wrote in the introduction, “we are
involved in a struggle for liberation,” a struggle that engaged workers and artists
alike, and that was birthed in the struggle for human rights for black Americans
and for women.6
In two of her essays for the volume, “On the Issue of Roles” and “The Pill: Geno-
cide or Revolution?,” Bambara makes it clear she has no use for “masculine” and
“feminine” roles, which destroy the ability of men and women to achieve their full
potential. Revolution was her goal, and achieving it required that she and her read-
ers take up “the task of creating a new identity, a self, perhaps an androgynous self,
via commitment to the struggle.” In her view, capitalism created and maintains
gender roles for the system’s benefit. She concedes that she has limited knowledge
of gender roles under other economic systems, then declares: “perhaps we need
to face the terrifying and overwhelming possibility that there are no models, that
we shall have to create them from scratch.”7 “The Pill” addresses an issue that was
hotly contested in the black community during the 1960s. Male black national-
ists raised the canard that birth control pills were a form of genocide. Bambara,
a female black nationalist, disagreed. In a voice inflected with the rhythms of the
urban black vernacular, she addressed her male counterparts: “it is revolutionary,
radical, and righteous to want for your mate what you want for yourself. And we
can’t be rhapsodizing about liberation, breeding warriors, revolution unless we are
willing to address ourselves to the woman’s liberation.”8 Bambara’s use of this last
phrase was deliberate. She invoked the women’s liberation movement but insisted
that the movement among black women would unfold in a different register. It
would not be a middle-class movement, and its goal would be the liberation of
black women and men.
When Bambara published a collection of short stories entitled Gorilla, My Love
two years later, she dramatized several of the themes in The Black Women. Among
the book’s most memorable characters are young girls, who represent a new kind
of female protagonist: fearless and bold, feisty and articulate.Read in tandem with
her essays, it is clear that they enact the new identity, the androgynous identity,
which Bambara called for. These young characters are angered by injustice of any
kind, whether it is the injustice of a theater owner who fails to show the movie
that he has advertised, or the societal injustice implicit in the existence of a fancy
store where toys cost more than a worker’s annual wage. Hazel Elizabeth Deborah
Parker, also known as Squeaky, the heroine of “Raymond’s Run,” is a case in point.
As she narrates her own story, she tells the reader right off that she is not like most
6 Cade, Toni: “Preface.” In: The Black Woman. New York: Signet 1970, p. 7.
7 Cade, Toni: “On the Issue of Roles.” In Cade 1970, p. 109.
8 Cade, Toni: “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation?” In Cade 1970, p. 165.
22 Cheryl A. Wall
girls: she does not do housework, she does not like to dress up, and she is an ex-
cellent athlete. Hazel is caring and responsible, so much so that her parents have
entrusted her with the care of her retarded older brother. Not only is Hazel able to
protect him from the taunts of neighborhood children, she decides in the end to
train Raymond to run so that he can earn the dignity she has attained for herself.
Under various aliases (Scout, Peaches, and Badbird), Hazel appears in four
stories, including the one that gives the volume its title. In each story, Hazel refuses
to yield her sense of right and wrong even when—or especially when—her views
are challenged by those in authority. Her moral vision is the source of her self-
confidence. Her disgust with the adult world stems from the failure of adults to
live up to the standards of honesty, integrity and self-respect that Hazel demands
of herself. In the sharpness of her social critique, Hazel is sister to Claudia, the
sometimes narrator of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and to Walker’s Ruth in The
Third Life of Grange Copeland.
Bambara’s use of first person narration intensifies the reader’s sense that Hazel
is speaking her own mind. As striking as what Hazel says, of course, is the way
she says it. Consider this passage from the title story: “And now I’m really furi-
ous cause I get so tired grownups messin over kids just cause they little and can’t
take em to court. What is it, he say to me like I lost my mittens or wet on myself
or am somebody’s retarded child. When in reality I am the smartest kid P.S. 186
ever had in its whole lifetime and you can ax anybody.”9 Bambara’s perfect pitch
for her characters’ speech is one of her greatest gifts. She writes the idiom without
the punctuation marks that called attention to the nonstandard dialect of black
characters in nineteenth and early twentieth-century texts by both white and black
American writers. Hazel’s speech is unmarked, unapologetic, and unforgettable.
Audre Lorde was Bambara’s contemporary: they taught together at City College
in New York, and Lorde wrote a poem dedicated to Bambara’s daughter. Lorde and
Bambara shared a commitment to struggle in all its complexities. Also in 1970,
Lorde published a poem entitled “Who Said It Was Simple” that captured the
multiple positions black women occupied. The poem’s speaker describes herself
sitting at Nedick’s, a one-time chain of coffee shops in Manhattan, with a group of
presumably white women preparing to attend a march. The women fail to notice
how the counterman ignores a black male customer in order to serve them. The
speaker is forced to reflect on her own positionality, aligned as she is with both
her white female comrades and the black man who is left waiting. Oppressed by
9 Bambara, Toni Cade: “Gorilla, My Love.” In: Gorilla, My Love. New York: Random
House 1972, p. 17.
both race and gender, she is left consequently to wonder which of her liberations
she will survive.10 The irony inheres in the heightened consciousness that the Civil
Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement produce and their sometimes
confusing consequences. With whom should the black woman be allied? Can
she be allied with white women and/or black men who cannot see her, let alone
each other?
A decade later, Lorde presented a talk entitled “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Wom-
en Redefining Difference,” subsequently published in her volume of essays and
speeches, Sister Outsider. In this piece, she contemplated the implications of the
position of the speaker of “Who Said It was Simple.” Black women’s positionality
yielded specific insights into the concept of difference, because of the particulars
of their circumstances. Yet, black women could be and were often impatient with
each other’s differences, especially with relation to class and sexuality. Lorde, who
always insisted on claiming all of who she was, called her “sisters” who rejected
lesbians as disloyal and “unblack” themselves. Writing at a time when some in the
black community held that homosexuality was “unblack,” Lorde deftly turned the
charge back on those who ignorantly hurled it.
Lorde’s stance was bold. Her reflections on her own identity are worth quoting
at length:
As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many ingredients of my identity, and a
woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly
being encouraged to pluck out some aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful
whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragment-
ing way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate
all of the parts of who I am, opening, allowing power from particular sources of my living
to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of
externally imposed definition.11
Lorde was in the vanguard of feminists of all races who declared that the personal
was political. The courage with which she drew the connection in her own life was
admirable. Still, the larger, theoretical point is worth noting. Lorde insisted on
claiming her multiple subjectivities. To deny any of them was to diminish who she
was. The integration of all of them gave her the power to move through the world.
As the larger discussion in which the passage appears makes clear, externally
10 Lorde, Audre: “Who Said It Was Simple.” In: Chosen Poems – Old and New. New York:
W.W. Norton 1982, pp. 49–50.
11 Lorde, Audre: “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Black Women Redefining Difference.” In:
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press
1984, pp. 120–121.
24 Cheryl A. Wall
imposed definitions come from the dominant society as well as from other black
people, both male and female. Lorde’s resistance is not only to the familiar racist
and gendered stereotypes imposed on black women, but also to the expectations
of other African Americans.
Beginning with the slave or liberation narrative, the impulse to define one’s self
has been a recurring theme in African American literature. Historically, however,
the impulse was mainly to define oneself in opposition to whites. Black women
writers in the 1920s and beyond had depicted female characters who resisted
being defined by males. At no time since then had calls for black unity been as
persistent as they were in the 1960s. Lorde nevertheless resisted attempts to sub-
ordinate her individual selves to the collective. Implicit in her analysis was the
belief that individuals who were able to live out their full and complex identities
strengthened the collective. What was also new in Lorde’s conception was the
public profession of what earlier generations had deemed private. Not surpris-
ingly, the best-known essay in Sister Outsider is “The Uses of the Erotic,” which
argued for the importance of sexuality in all its dimensions—physical, emotional,
and spiritual—as a source of female power. “Age, Race, Class and Sex” should be
considered a companion piece.
Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name shows how useful the idea of differ-
ence was for Lorde’s creative work. As “biomythography,” the word she coins for
the book’s genre denotes, Zami is an innovative text. Rather than autobiography,
the biomythography explores biography as myth, myth as biography. In an inter-
view with the scholar Claudia Tate, Lorde describes the result as “really fiction. It
has elements of biography and history [and] myth. In other words, it’s fiction built
from many sources.”12 Audre, Zami’s protagonist, is also invented, albeit confected
from autobiographical elements. The journey the narrative maps culminates with
Audre’s achievement of a self at peace with the multiple aspects of her gender and
class as well as sexual, racial, and ethnic identity. Several of the book’s other female
characters, including Audre’s mother Linda, her girlhood friend Gennie, and her
white lover Eudora remain trapped in their externally imposed definitions. Just as
Zami celebrates Audre’s successful quest, it measures the cost of these characters’
truncated journeys.
Her erotic relationships are the means through which Audre develops political
and poetic consciousness. Ultimately, she learns to embrace the differences that
have oppressed her: “It was a while before we came to realize our place was the
12 Tate, Claudia: Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum 1983, p. 115.
very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference.”13
Of course, the “house of difference” was a difficult place to reside, which is perhaps
one reason the narrative becomes increasingly invested in myth. The ancestral
women of Carriacou and the goddesses of Dahomey lead Audre to an understand-
ing of difference as a source of liberation instead of oppression. Rather than double
or triple jeopardy, as some black feminists had termed black female identity, in
Zami—as in Lorde’s volume of poems The Black Unicorn—women’s race, gender,
and class (as well as sexuality, ethnicity, and age) expand consciousness and vi-
sion. Tellingly, myth and memory also become key elements in the poetry and
fiction of Lorde’s contemporaries, including Lucille Clifton, Paule Marshall, Toni
Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker.
Language is of course the writer’s medium. We’ve seen Bambara’s use of Black
English, a subject which she, like most of her peers, analyzed insightfully. In an
interview with Kalamu ya Salaam entitled “Searching for a Mother Tongue,” she
announced, “I’m trying to break words open and get at the bones, deal with sym-
bols as if they were atoms. I’m trying to find out not only how a word gains its
meaning, but how a word gains its power.”14 In The Salt Eaters, her experimental,
futuristic novel published in 1980, Bambara fuses the urban vernacular of Gorilla,
My Love with a more spiritually-inflected language that enacts the quest she de-
scribes here. In her essays as well as her fiction, Walker often stylized a southern
black vernacular language. Indeed, in The Color Purple she, like Bambara, elimi-
nated the mediating voice usually found in vernacular fiction, such as the voice of
the third-person narrator in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that intones:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”15 By contrast, Celie, the first-
person narrator of The Color Purple, speaks directly to the reader in the language
of uneducated black rural southerners. In a much less well-known young adult
novel, His Own Where (1967), June Jordan had written a book entirely in Black
English, a language she defended and celebrated in several of her essays as well.
One of the most memorable reflections on language is Paule Marshall’s “The
Poets in the Kitchen,” originally published in The New York Times on 9 January
1983, and frequently reprinted since. While drawing a literary genealogy that, like
13 Lorde, Audre: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press 1982,
p. 226.
14 ya Salaam, Kalamu: “Searching for the Mother Tongue: An Interview with Toni Cade
Bambara.” Reprinted in: Holmes, Linda J. / Wall, Cheryl A. (eds.): Savoring the Salt: The
Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2008, pp. 58–59.
15 Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God. (1937). New York: HarperCollins
1990, p. 1.
26 Cheryl A. Wall
Alice Walker’s, includes her mother, Marshall reminds us that black vernacular
English comes in different accents. The piece is set in her mother’s Brooklyn
kitchen on occasions when her mother’s friends, who like her mother were Barba-
dian immigrants and domestic workers, gathered. They discussed everything from
family to neighborhood gossip to their white employers to national events. In a
world in which these women had no say, their determination to speak about eve-
rything and everyone, including Marcus Garvey and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
was their way of asserting themselves. If, their talk was in part therapy, as Marshall
concedes, “that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet
for the tremendous creative energy they possessed.”16 With this observation, Mar-
shall connects their language to her literary art. She analyzes the source of their
language—the standard English they were taught in school in Barbados and which
they transformed “into an idiom, an instrument that more adequately described
them—changing around the syntax and imposing their own rhythm and accent
so that the sentences were more pleasing to their ears.” They used language to
give themselves what scholars term agency, but also—and equally important to
Marshall—they used language as a source of aesthetic pleasure. The phrases the
essay quotes (“tumbling big” for pregnant, “thoroughfare” to describe a woman
free with her sexual favors,” “beautiful—ugly” to denote something admired yet
not quite desired) allow readers to partake of that pleasure as well. Moreover,
the last phrase suggests how language reveals the worldview of those who use
it. Marshall reads a “fundamental dualism” into the phrase, a sense that a thing
contains its opposite.17 She carefully distinguishes that dualism from a Manichean
view of the world. These women do not separate things of the body from things
of the spirit and attribute evil to some and good to others. I think, rather, that the
“beautiful-ugly” trope invests everything with the potential of both evil and good.
Like Walker and Lorde, who cites her mother as her first literary influence,
Marshall expresses her artistic debt to the “poets in the kitchen,” who teach her
more about the power and beauty of language than the authors whose works she
soon encounters in the Brooklyn Public Library. In her 1959 novel, Brown Girl,
Brownstones, which anticipated the renaissance among black women writers, Mar-
shall had invented the character of Silla Boyce, who could have been one of the
women in the kitchen. But Silla is psychologically more complex than the figures
in the essay. Alienated from her Caribbean home, she experiences racial prejudice
16 Marshall, Paule: “The Poets in the Kitchen. In: Reena and Other Stories. New York: The
Feminist Press 1983, p. 6.
17 Ibid., pp. 8, 9.
and economic exploitation in New York City. Her determination is admirable.

But she is also fiercely ambitious and willing to sacrifice her family and friends
in order to achieve the goal of owning a brownstone in Brooklyn. Her daughter
Selina, the novel’s protagonist, finds “other mothers” among her southern-born
black neighbors, to nurture her dreams.
Literature complicates theories of intersectionality by forcing readers to come
to terms with psychology as a crucial element in the formation of identity. Wheth-
er in her first novel or in Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the novel that was
published contemporaneously with “The Poets in the Kitchen,” Marshall invents
characters whose distinctive personalities exceed social categories. Avey is unlike
her similarly middle-class friends, and therefore she is receptive to the experi-
ences she encounters on the island of Carriacou. Ironically, Audre never visits the
island that figures so prominently in her imagination; Avey, who has never heard
of it, does. In fiction we see how the intersecting lines of race, gender, class, and
sexuality ensnare characters differently and how their different psychologies allow
them to break free or remain entrapped.
In her choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the
rainbow is enuf, performed in San Francisco in 1974 and on Broadway in 1976,
Ntozake Shange invests characters with distinct personalities even as she identi-
fies them by the color of their costume rather than by name. “The lady in brown,”
“the lady in blue,” “the lady in red” are all African American women in their
twenties, who have endured racism and sexism. Apart from the lady in brown,
who describes her school girl crush on Toussaint Overture, and the lady in yel-
low, who narrates the harrowing description of being raped on the night of her
high school prom, few share details about their backgrounds. Yet through their
words and their dance, the characters vividly distinguish themselves from each
other. Their stories revolve around recurrent themes of love and betrayal, yet
each has its memorable details. The lady in blue moves to Latin beats, the lady in
red dances her “sanctified” love, while the lady in green moves to the rhythms of
New Orleans jazz.
No play before it had foregrounded black women’s lives like for colored girls
did. Its frank treatment of abortion, rape, and domestic violence riveted audi-
ences and provoked a critical firestorm, especially from some male critics who
viewed it as an attack on black men. It was no such thing. As the absence of black
men on stage signified, the play was not about them. The opening poem “sing a
black girl’s song” defined the play’s subject and theme. The author, born Paulette
Williams, had given herself a new name, Ntozake, “she who comes with her own
things,” and Shange, “she who walks with lions.” She invented a theater piece in
which black women with cosmopolitan tastes move boldly through the world.
28 Cheryl A. Wall
They throw off phrases in Spanish with élan, allude to recordings by the avant-
garde jazz musicians Oliver Lake and Archie Shepp, and embrace the freedom to
love whom they choose. To overcome the hurt that has dogged them nonetheless,
they learn finally to love themselves.
In a declaration that echoed those of her sister writers, Shange asserted in
the 1970s, “I owe not one more moment of thought to the status of European
masters. I don’t have to worry that Ira Aldridge thinks poorly of me for not ac-
cepting a challenge/ the battle is over. I am settling my lands with my characters,
my language, my sense of right & wrong, my sense of time & rhythm. The rest
of my life can go along in relative aesthetic peace/ the enemy has been banished
from my horizons.”18 After Alice Walker made similar statements in her essays,
she went “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” and “Looking for Zora.” Toni Cade
Bambara returned to the Harlem streets she had known as a child and invented
characters that were perhaps idealized versions of herself. Long before the term
diaspora became part of the scholarly lexicon, Audre Lorde imagined a home
in Carriacou, a “magic place” in the Caribbean which she had never seen, but
which she “knew well out of my mother’s mouth.”19 Paule Marshall depicted an
actual journey to Carriacou, where, in the dance of the nations, her protagonist
reconnected with her spirits of her African forebears. And Ntozake Shange, in for
colored girls and her numerous books of poetry and prose, mapped “a daughter’s
geography” settling lands throughout the Americas. As a consequence of these
writers’ critical interventions, in their day the phrase “black woman artist” could
mean anything they chose it to mean.
18 Shange, Ntozake: lost in language and sound: or how i found my way to the arts: essays.
New York: St. Martin’s Press 2011, p. 43. Ira Aldridge was a nineteenth-century black
American actor, who was famous for his Shakespearean roles.
19 Lorde, Zami 1982, p. 13.
Nagueyalti Warren
Home Girls and Sister Outsider: The Roots of

First-Wave Black Feminism

Feminism for black women in the United States most likely began during their
enslavement. The feminist stance of women fugitives from slavery, including Har-
riett Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and of free women of color as well as the
women evangelist and itinerant preachers Maria Stewart, Jerena Lee and Julia
Foote, who dared to challenge the Church hierarchy, are just the well-known ex-
amples. Lee, Foote, Stewart, and Frances Gaudet left for us autobiographies that
interrogate issues of race, class, and gender,1 just like the enslaved Harriet Jacobs,
who documented her attempt at seizing control of her own sexuality and recorded
her actions in Incidences in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While the connection
between white first-wave feminism and the second-wave feminism that came
to fruition in the late 1960s and 1970s is clear, the link between first-wave black
feminists and second-wave black women involved in the Civil Rights and Black
Power Movements is less clear.
During the second-wave feminist movement, many black women faced a di-
lemma their predecessors seem not to have confronted, that is whether to choose
between a movement of white women or a black movement aimed at liberat-
ing black people. First-wave black feminists were abolitionists, suffragists, anti-
lynching crusaders, temperance supporters and advocates for gender and sexual
equality. They were not blind to racism in white women’s organizations, nor were
they insensitive to the sexism existing in black organizations. They confronted
these issues as they struggled for justice. In a speech before the Eleventh National
1 See Richardson, Marylin: Maria Stewart: First Black Woman Political Writer.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1988; Lee, Jerena: Religious Experience and
Journal of Mrs. Jerena Lee, Self Written. (1836). Philadelphia: privately printed 1849;
Foote, Julia: A Brand Plucked from the Firs: An Autobiographical Sketch. Cleveland:
Lauer & Yost 1879; and Gaudet, Frances: He Leadeth Me. New Orleans: Louisiana
Printing, Co. 1913. For more information about these autobiographies see Haywood,
Chanta M.: Prophesying Daughters: Black Women Preachers and the Word 1823-1913.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press 2003.
30 Nagueyalti Warren
Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, Frances Watkins Harper related the facts of
her dispossession following her husband’s sudden death, and concluded that she
would have been treated differently had she not been a woman. Moreover, she
also told the white women that while they spoke of rights, she spoke of wrongs
and related the injustices suffered by African Americans and the many insults
suffered by women because they were black.2
One might wonder why there is not the same continuity between black femi-
nists as there appears to be for white feminists. Why is there a need for separate
nomenclature to distinguish black feminism? For example, Womanism, Alice
Walker’s moniker, or Africana Womanism introduced by Clenora Hudson-Weems
both make an effort to reach black women who were seemingly resistant to femi-
nism.3 One explanation might be that research regarding the activities of early
black feminists was not as available as it is today, the result of black and women’s
studies programs and departments. For example, few scholars in the 1960s knew
that in 1888, a black woman, E.F.J., writing in the New York Age, argued that
women were more “than household machines,” or that the abolitionist, author, and
feminist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, writing in the English Woman’s Review,
declared “The women as a class are quite equal to the men in energy and execu-
tive ability,” pointing out that whereas men work and talk, women take care of
the home and family and acquire education for themselves, “doing double duty.”4
Apparently, African American women had no problem identifying as feminist,
working for women’s rights and for the freedom and justice of black people. Nor
were they unaware of the racism that existed in the white feminist movement. As
Fannie Jackson Coppin reminded the Congress of Representative Women, they
could not “be indifferent to the history of colored women in America.”5 These early
black women were feminist in the truest sense of the word. They were pro-woman.
It did not mean they were anti-men. They understood what Anna Julia Cooper’s
classic quotation reveals: “Only the Black Woman can say ‘when and where I enter,
2 The term African American refers specifically to black people within the United States,
while the term Black is a universal term designated for all people of African descent as
well as Africans on the continent of Africa.
3 Walker’s definition appears in Walker, Alice: In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. New
York: Harcourt, Brace, & Company 1983, pp. xi–xii. Weems introduced her term much
earlier, at conferences in the late 1980s, but in print, it appears in Weems, Clenora
Hudson: Africana Womanist Literary Theory. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 2004.
4 Zackodnik, Teresa (ed.): African American Feminisms 1828-1923. New York: Routledge
2007, pp. 315, 29, 29 respectively,
5 Ibid., p. 18.
The Roots of Black Feminist Literary Criticism 31
in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without

suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’”6
Although some scholars consider the Black women’s club movement of the
1890 as the beginning of black feminist organizing,7 black feminist organizing did
in fact occur prior to the women’s club movement, through literary and mutual
benefit societies. In 1818, the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society in
Salem, Massachusetts drafted its own constitution.8 In 1830 there were eighty
such societies in Philadelphia. The African Dorcas Association supported free
schools and literary societies which enhanced writing skills and sharpened
political views.9 While the history of black women’s feminism is clear, it has not
been widely acknowledged or disseminated; and, in some instances, it has been
deliberately obfuscated in order to promote conservative agendas.
Second-Wave Black Feminism

Black feminist criticism, closely tied to the academy, emerges within the context
of second-wave feminism, which developed in the waning days of the Civil Rights
Movement and within the context of the burgeoning Black Power Movement. As
6 Cooper, Anna Julia: A Voice from the South. Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House 1892,
p. 39, emphasis in the text. Cooper argued for the higher education of women as
she had once argued when she was only nine years old for her own education and
the right to take classes reserved for boys at St. Augustine Normal school in North
Carolina. Just as Cooper presented her speech, pertinently titled “Womanhood: The
Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” before a group of male
clergy in 1886, so many feminist theologians operated “from a stance of ‘radical obe-
dience,’” taking their directions and calling from a Divine Source. Using the Bible
to substantiate their positions, the women claimed a public voice in response to a
Divine call. As the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham states, the very “ortho-
doxy of their stance compelled the men to listen.” See Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks:
Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1900.
Cambridge: Harvard 1993, p. 149.
7 For some, the club movement represents an example of elitism, even though its motto
was “Lifting as we climb.” Many clubwomen argued about the limits of domestic-
ity, but not as many were concerned about the plight of working-class and poor
women. Mary Church Terrell was an exception. She argued for the rights of working
mothers and for political equality for all. For more about Terrell and clubwomen see
Zackodnik 2007.
8 See Sterling, Dorothy: We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century.
New York: Norton 1985.
9 See Zackodnik 2007, p. xliv.
such, sexual politics plays a large role in resisting the development of the twentieth
century feminist movement for black women. The Civil Rights Movement, gov-
erned by southern male clergy, was middle class in terms of its values and mores.
Its political orientation was integrationist; its ideas about family, femininity, and the
role of women reflect white cultural paradigms. The new and more secular Black
Power Movement was not interested in assimilating white, Eurocentric ideas, but
it was interested in acquiring all the benefits of patriarchy. In 1967 Ron Karenga,
the father of Kwanzaa, articulated a commonly held view: “What makes a woman
appealing is femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive. A
man has to be a leader.”10 Joyce Ladner and other women in the Civil Rights and
Black Power movements recall the change that took place after 1965, the result of
the infamous Moynihan Report defining black family structure as pathological:
“something did happen in our community after 1965, something did happen as
we moved to Black Power and as we moved to black nationalism and as the Black
Muslims became very prominent in terms of their attitude toward women.”11 The
radical nationalist groups accepted traditional and conservative notions of man-
hood and womanhood, even to the point of embracing Western Christian anti-
homosexual prejudices. Manning Marable summarizes the Black Power sentiment
as follows: “In the Black community talking about issues of gender is seen as a kind
of anti-Black discourse, that is to say outside the context of Blackness, and anti-
Black because it takes the focus away from the ‘real’ issue which is race. Blackness
is also defined in heterosexist ways, so that if you’re gay you clearly can’t be black.”12
The rhetoric of black cultural nationalists, together with the failure of the sec-
ond-wave white feminist movement to acknowledge fully the issues of race and
class, prevented many black women from embracing feminism. Yet some black
women took up the challenge. In some ways, it can be said that bell hooks’ critique
of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) marks the beginning of the sec-
ond-wave feminist movement. Pointing out how women of color and poor white
women were not included in what Friedan described, hooks noted that in the
United States, feminism had never come from the grass roots, that is, from those
most victimized by sexist oppression—“a silent majority.”13 Audre Lorde’s effort
10 Ron Karenga qtd. in Betsch Cole, Johnnetta / Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (eds.): Gender
Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities. New York:
Ballantine 2003, p. 27.
11 Prathia Hall qtd. in Betsch Cole / Guy-Sheftall 2003, p. 93.
12 Manning Marable qtd. in Betsch Cole / Guy-Sheftall 2003, p. 31.
13 hooks, bell: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (1984). Cambridge: South End
Press 2000, p. 1.
to transform silence into language and action opened dialogue among black and
white feminists within the academy. Her address on the Lesbian and Literature
Panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1977, where she uttered her
memorable statement “Your silence will not protect you,” was a call to voice for
black women silenced by the accusatory and sexist critiques of black men.14 It was
a call to interrogate and acknowledge the intersections of race, gender, and class as
first-wave black feminists had done and black women writers were already doing.15
Black Writers Creating Feminist Works

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange
Copeland, both of which appeared in 1970, introduced to the second half of the
twentieth century black feminist fiction. These early works, together with Maya
Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Cade’s anthol-
ogy The Black Woman, also published in 1970, spoke truth to power. Each work
contained an unabashed look at the lives of black women and girls. The picture
was not pretty.16
Morrison’s work attacked the culture and the men that focused on the superflu-
ous aspects of women, viewing them as decorations, and the racism that glori-
fied a white aesthetic symbolized in blue eyes. Cholly rapes and impregnates his
own daughter, Pecola. Morrison thus exposed child abuse that many in the black
community would deny existed. Morrison was attacked for writing an undeni-
able truth—although, curiously, no one thought to chastise Ralph Ellison when
in his novel Invisible Man (1952) a black male character committed incest on his
daughter.
14 Audre Lorde quoted in Betsch Cole / Guy-Sheftall 2003, p. 41.

15 One should not forget Michelle Wallace’s critique of the Civil Rights Movement and the
Black Power Movement in Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman (New York: Dial
1978), which challenged sexist stereotypes, causing a vitriolic explosion of criticism
from within the black activist communities, resulting in the infamous “Black Sexism
Debate: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” published in the March/April 1979
issue of The Black Scholar, the first public debate on sexism in the African American
communities.
16 A later text that also “spoke truth to power” was Ntozake shange’s choreopoem for
colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975). The choreo-
poem was considered by many black male critics as a quintessential example of male-
bashing by a black woman writer and came under attack in the infamous “Black Sexism
Debate.”
Walker’s novel presented the murder of a wife and mother by her husband
and the father of her children. In her community in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker
witnessed as an impressionable young girl of thirteen the actual dead body of
Mrs. Walker (who, though she had the same last name, was not related to Alice
Walker). The woman’s face had been shot off. In the first edition of The Third Life
of Grange Copeland there is no explanation, no afterword. Walker apparently as-
sumed that the novel could, as did those written by male authors, stand its own
ground. However, the firestorm of criticism and challenges that followed the pub-
lication of her work, especially later, after the film version of The Color Purple in
1988, compelled Walker to substantiate her characterizations with evidence from
her own lived experience. Mrs. Walker had been a real person, and many of the
events in The Third Life were woven from the fabric of Alice Walker’s own life.
Maya Angelou’s first autobiography makes explicit the caged bird experience
of Black girls and women. Speaking of her own life, she says: “If growing up is
painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on
the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”17 Still it is a neces-
sary knowing, one that each girl must come to terms with. The radical feminist
insistence on examining identity politics enables women and girls to survive the
insult. Toni Cade’s anthology presented a collage of feminist poetry, short stories
and essays confronting the myth of the “castrating” black woman, black power,
and birth control. The collection represents the diverse views of black women.
Audre Lorde, writing in The Cancer Journals: Special Edition, says that women’s
“feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.”18 Her words
crystallize the pernicious nature of the biblical injunction of the Apostle Paul: Let
your women keep silent. Silence is death. The sharing of experience is helpful and
life-saving for the women who read other women writers. Of Lorde’s journals
Walker writes that she has been “helped more than [she] can say; it has taken away
some of [her] fear of cancer, [her] fear of incompleteness, [her] fear of difference.
This book teaches [...] that with one breast or none,” she remains herself. That the
sum total of her being is infinitely greater than the number of her breasts.19 Yet
women’s writings continue to be dismissed by too many men, black and white.
17 Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (1970). New York: Bantam Books
1993, p. 3.
18 Lorde, Audre: The Cancer Journals: Special Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books
[1980] 1997, p. 7.
19 Walker quoted on the blurb of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals: Special Edition 1997.
In “Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist,”20 Walker declares that the writer
must put into words the courage and dignity of black people’s lives, the lived
experiences of both women and men. The women writers of the second-wave
black women’s movement have done this, and black women critics have heeded
the call by providing enlightening readings, creating space for the next embold-
ened analysis.21

While Alice Walker opened the door for discussing black women’s creativity with
her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” (1974), which argues
for the recognition of their resilient creativity in the wake of racism, poverty,
and physical and mental abuse, and in the following year Barbara Christian ad-
vanced the conversation about tradition by examining images of Black women
in Afro-American literature, turning her research into Black Women Novelists,
The Development of a Tradition (1980),22 it was Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black
Feminist Criticism” (1977) and Home Girls (1981) and Lorde’s essays in Sister Out-
sider (1984), many of them publicly delivered in 1977 and 1978, that significantly
changed the face of black women’s literary criticism. Interrogating the homopho-
bia, ageism, racism, classism, and sexism that plagued the academy and inhibited
the works of black women critics, Lorde’s and Smith’s essays led to a deep critique
of both black and white feminism, and pointed to the absence of a sustainable
20 The essay comes from Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens 1983, pp. 130–38.
21 There have been glaring exceptions, like Trudier Harris’ initial critique of The Color
Purple, and the response from Toni Morrison to Barbara Smith’s lesbian reading of
Sula. In an interview, she said the idea of Sula and Nel as lesbians was interesting but
that Smith was arrogant to have read it that way. See Morrison quoted in Denard,
Carolyn (ed.): Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi
2008, p. 70. For Harris’s and Smith’s readings, see Harris, Trudier: “On The Color Purple,
Stereotypes, and Silences.” Black American Literature Forum 18(4) 1984, pp. 155–161
and Smith, Barbara: “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In: Napier, Winston (ed.):
African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York University Press
2000, pp. 132–146, respectively.
22 Christian’s 1975 essay “Images of Black Women in Afro-American Literature: From
Stereotype to Character” was published in Christian, Barbara: Black Feminist Criticism:
Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press 1985, pp. 1–30. Alice
Walker’s essay was first published as “The Creativity of Black Women in the South”
by Ms. Magazine in May 1974. Titled as “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” it was
reprinted in Walker 1983, pp 231–243.
black feminist movement that could force the implementation of black women’s
literature within the academy in the same way that the white women’s feminist
movement had done for women’s studies. Their works have enabled others to con-
front openly and honestly the diverse experiences of black women and to critique
in writing what marginalized women have said and have written.
In 1977, the same year that Audre Lorde addressed the Modern Language As-
sociation’s Lesbian and Literature Panel with “The Transformation of Silence into
Language and Action,” members of The Combahee River Collective23 formulated
a public statement delineating the beginning of black feminism at the grass roots
level in the black community. The statement further declared an inclusiveness of
Third World women and black men in line with the universalism articulated in
Alice Walker’s definition of Womanism as concern for the survival of all people,
male and female. Finally, the collective statement concluded with a commitment
to examine their own politics, critique themselves, and promote “a nonhierarchi-
cal distribution of power.”24 Both Smith and Lorde were among the organizers of
this lesbian feminist group of artist and activists.
The women of the collective demanded the right to focus on their own oppres-
sion and they stated that the most profound and radical politics come from their
own identity, naming them identity politics. Rather than accepting the rhetoric
of the Black Nationalism which claimed that the priority was racism not sexism,
these feminists knew that the problem was not either-or but both racism and sex-
ism experienced simultaneously. The political issues facing black women were the
interlocking oppressions of race, gender, and class. Political at its core, as Duchess
Harris argues, “[T]he work of the Combahee paved the way for unequivocal and
unapologetic theoretical and creative articulations of black feminism during the
1970s and into the 1980s.”25 The roots of this idea of the simultaneity of interlock-
ing oppressions, a crucial aspect of black feminist criticism, can be traced back
to the Combahee statement.
23 The Combahee River Collective was not the only black feminist organization, but it is
the most well-known. Black women were also active members of the National Black
Feminist Organization (NBFO) and the National Organization of Women (NOW). For
more on black feminist organizations see Springer, Kimberly: Living for the Revolution:
Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980. Durham: Duke University Press 2005.
24 “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Retrieved 26.7.2015 from http://circui-
tous.org/scraps/combahee.html.
25 Harris, Duchess: Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan 2011, p. 35.
In 1977, Barbara Smith also published her groundbreaking challenge to black

women critics and academics with the essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criti-
cism.” In the essay, Smith calls for critics to analyze black women’s texts from a
feminist perspective. Frustrated by racist remarks made by white women who
claimed to be feminists, Smith challenged black women academics to develop a
black feminist literary theory. She reasoned that since the attacks coming from
black men and the misreadings from others were failing to analyze the works
of black women writers thoroughly, a feminist critique would remedy the prob-
lem. Smith’s work with the Modern Language Association (MLA) as the first
woman of color on the MLA Commission on the Status of Women in the Pro-
fession enabled her to lobby simultaneously for women’s studies and for a black
feminist literary criticism.26 Referring to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s,
Smith stated that the need for “nonhostile and perceptive analysis” had already
been demonstrated by the critics who introduced the black aesthetic.27 While ac-
knowledging feminist literary scholarship, such as Alice Walker’s course on Black
Women Writers offered at Wellesley College in 1972, Mary Helen Washington’s
1974 essay on Zora Neale Hurston, and Robert Hemenway’s literary biography
of Zora Neale Hurston published in 1977, Smith called for black critics to define
black feminist criticism.28
Her call initially met with reluctance to define black feminist criticism. Scholars
were hesitant to define black feminist criticism because definitions limit, and, as
Toni Morrison pointed out, definitions often become narrow and constrict crea-
tivity. They can become dogma.29 As a participant in the Black Arts Movement,
Barbara Christian knew the danger of theory. As she later recalled, “The Black
Arts Movement tried to create Black Literary Theory and in doing so became
prescriptive.”30 Like Morrison, Christian argues against narrow definitions as well
26 See Jones, Alethia / Eubanks, Virginia (eds.): Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around:
Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. New York: SUNY Press 2014.
27 Smith in Napier 2000, p. 133.
28 See Washington, Mary Helen: “The Black Woman’s Search for Identity: Zora Neale
Hurston’s Work.” Black World 21(10) 1972, p. 68 and Hemenway, Robert: Zora Neale
Hurston: A Literary Biography. (1977). Champaign: University of Illinois Press 1980,
respectively. Black World published Washington’s essay together with June Jordan’s
essay “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes on a Balancing of Love and
Hate” and Ellease Southerland’s essay “The Novelist/Anthropologist/Life Work.” They
appeared on pages 4–8 and 20–30, respectively.
29 Morrison in Denard, p. 39.
30 Christian, Barbara: “The Race for Theory.” In Bowels, Gloria M. / Fabi, Giulia M. /
Keizer, Arlene R. (eds.): New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000. Urbana: University
as against the imposition of the European philosophical theories that were de

rigeur during the last part of the twentieth century.
Barbara Smith also bemoaned the fact that there was no black feminist publica-
tion in which black feminist criticism might appear. Writing was one thing, but
getting the writing published presented another barrier, and it was more difficult
for lesbian feminists than for heterosexual feminists. Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press, established in 1980, addressed the need for an autonomous publish-
ing outlet. Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde were co-founders, along with other
feminist activists. The press published eight books and five pamphlets. Among
the most impactful were This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color (1981), edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Audre
Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (1986). These
works made significant inroads in that they announced the radical positions of
women of color. Furthermore, This Bridge Called my Back was a representative
coalition of brown, black, Asian and Native women writers.31 The Foreword, writ-
ten by Toni Cade Bambara, announced that the works were breaking the silence
and reclaiming the women’s voices. The volume included such groundbreaking
works as Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly” as well as her pivotal essay “The Mas-
ter’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in which Lorde, speaking to
a group of white academic feminists, argued that academics could not dismantle
the structures of racism, sexism and homophobia using the same tools of logic
that the oppressors used. However, the truth was that some were not trying to
dismantle; they simply wanted to get inside. I am Your Sister was a significant call
for black women to examine their heterosexist bias and homophobia.
Conditions, a feminist publication paying particular attention to lesbian work,
began publishing in 1976, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1979, Conditions: Five: The
Black Women’s Issue, edited by Smith and Lorraine Bethel, was published. It be-
came the basis for Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, published in 1983
by the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. The publication gave substance to
Smith’s theory. The anthology contained a mix of genres including poetry, essays
and even photographs. The essays that constitute a feminist critique include Gloria
Hull’s “What is it I Think She’s Doing Anyway: A Reading of Toni Cade Bam-
bara’s The Salt Eaters” and Ann Allen Shockley’s “The Black Lesbian in American
of Illinois Press 2007, p. 46. [The essay is discussed in more detail in Chapter II of this
book (editor’s note)].
31 This Bridge Called my Back won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book
Award in 1986 and sold more than 86,000 copies. Updated and reprinted by SUNY
Press, the fourth edition appeared in March 2015.
Literature: An Overview.” Alice Walker’s essay “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse”
and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” bring
this unique anthology to a close.
Smith, Lorde and other feminists who made the bold move of establishing the
press and publishing anthologies encouraged other black women to follow suit.
Sturdy Black Bridges: Black Women in Literature, edited by Roseann Bell, Bettye J.
Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, appeared in 1979, and in 1983 Sage: A Scholarly
Journal on Black Women, co-founded by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Bell-
Scott and edited by Bell-Scott, began publishing scholarly articles by and about
black women. While focused on themes, the first edition being Black Women’s
Health, the journal also included book reviews and published issues focused on
literature.
These early publishing outlets were transformative, providing space for sensi-
tive and constructive analyses of black women’s writings. Prior to their existence,
black women’s works were either ignored or misread. Mary Helen Washington’s
essay “‘Taming All That Anger Down’: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks’
Maud Martha” outlines the way in which black women’s literature was dismissed.32
Referring to the egregious misreadings of Gwendolyn Brooks’ only novel Maud
Martha by white/male critics, she wrote “No one recognized it as a novel dealing
with the very sexism and racism that these reviewers enshrined.”33 Washington’s
reading of Maud Martha as a feminist and Smith’s controversial reading of Sula
as a lesbian in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” offered fresh perspectives in
the understanding of black women’s fiction.
Washington’s feminist reading of Maud Martha reveals the anger and discon-
tent that would explode in the second-wave feminist movement of the late 60s
and 70s. Smith’s reading of Sula offers a broader definition of lesbian, stating that
the literary lesbian need not be sexually intimate in a relationship with a woman
but must be at the center of the novel and the relationship with women must be
pivotal. She claims “Despite the apparent heterosexuality of the female characters
[...] Sula [...] works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate friend-
ship between Sula and Nel but because of Morrison’s consistently critical stance
toward the heterosexual institutions of male-female relationships, marriage, and
the family.”34
32 Washington, Mary Helen: “Taming All That Anger Down’: Rage and Silence in
Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha.” Massachusetts Review 24(2)1983, pp. 453–466.
33 Ibid., p. 453. The reviewers were Fanny Butcher, Hubert Creeknore, and Henry F.
Winslow, the reviewer for Crisis. There were no reviews by black women.
34 Smith in Napier 2000, p. 138.
In spite of the resistance articulated by both black women critics and some
black women writers about the dangers of black critical feminist theory, Smith’s
essay does not posit a straitjacket approach to analyzing black women’s writ-
ing. Her general recommendations appear open-ended. She suggests that crit-
ics should be highly innovative, think and write out of their own identity, and
refuse to graft the idea or methodology of white/male literary thought onto black
women’s art. Perhaps most important is her advice to be aware of the political
implications of the critics’ work and to make connections between the work
and the political situation of all black women. However, this attention to the
political proved to be problematic for some black women. Deborah McDowell
in “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism” (1980) argued that feminist
critics must guard against “the dangers of political ideology yoked with aesthetic
judgment,”35 an old argument that has plagued black literature from its inception
in the United States. Many have argued that the literature of an oppressed people
is inherently political.
By the 1980s, black feminist literary criticism was gaining recognition. The
publication of Mary Helen Washington’s Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary
Black Women Writers (1980), her earlier anthology, Black-Eyed Susans: Classic
Stories by and About Black Women (1975), and her essay “Teaching Black-Eyed Su-
sans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers” that appeared in Black
American Literature Forum in 1977 rank among the transformational works of
black women critics.36 The 1980s also saw the publication of Gloria Hull, Patricia
Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith’s All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men,
But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), which called attention to the erasure of Black
women in both African American Studies and Women’s Studies departments. The
move to eradicate this omission resulted in the offering of new courses focused
on the writings of black women. The groundwork laid by these feminist antholo-
gies and the black lesbian feminist publishing house, together with other writing
that scrutinized women’s lives, called for scholarly analysis. Nevertheless, even in
the wake of a growing body of work by black women writers and positive criti-
cism from black women scholars, the reception of both black artists and scholars
rendered them outsiders.
In Sister Outsider Lorde clarifies the failure of the white feminist movement,
pointing to their inability or unwillingness to recognize the multidimensional
35 McDowell, Deborah: “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism.” In Napier 2000,
p. 171.
36 Washington, Mary Helen: “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of
Black Women Writers.” Black American Literature Forum 11(2) 1977, pp. 20–25.
oppressions of black women, a failure that rendered the black sisters outsiders.
In her 1979 letter to Mary Daly, Lorde attempts to break the silence regarding the
apparent invisibility of black women writers and poets, asking if Daly “ever really
read the work of black women?”37 In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master’s House” she writes that women’s “need and desire to nurture each other
is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real
power is rediscovered.”38 The essay points out that black women are not responsi-
ble for educating white feminists regarding black works. Lorde would also deliver
a similar message to black men. Responding to their claims of ostracism, the result
of black feminist writing,39 Lorde declares: “Black men’s feelings of cancellation,
their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by
Black women when it is at the expense of our own ‘curious rage.’”40 Recognizing
that a tactic of the oppressor is to keep the oppressed engaged with the issues of the
oppressor, she focuses her creative energy on black women and herself as subjects.
Both Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, along with the women of the Combahee
Collective, used their energy, bravery and foresight to encourage black women
writers and scholars to break the silence and be courageous. These two radical
lesbian feminists lit a fire that continues to burn. While one could argue the early
works of Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Christian were the genesis of black
feminist literary criticism, and of course their works were seminal, an analogy can
be made with the Civil Rights Movement and the efforts of Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Malcolm X. Compromises were reached with King in order to avoid the
more radical confrontations with Malcolm X. Smith and Lorde helped create the
environment in which black women writers and black feminist critics could grow.
From then on, teaching the works of Black women from a feminist perspective
was unavoidable. Moreover, the work of the lesbian feminists had so radicalized
black women that, as Nellie McKay announced, “Whether [she] was teaching
William Faulkner or Henry James, by speaking out on [her] position as a black
37 Lorde, Audre: Zami/Sister Outsider/Undersong. New York: Quality Paperback Book

Club 1993, p. 91.
38 Ibid., p. 95.
39 This is evident, for example, in Robert Staples’ essay “The Myth of the Black Macho:
A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” published in the The Black Scholar issue, pre-
ceding the issue with “Black Sexism Debate.” See Staples, Robert: “The Myth of the
Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.” The Black Scholar 10(6–7) 1979,
pp. 24–33.
40 Lorde, Zami/Sister Outsider/Undersong 1993, p. 61.
woman, the course becomes a black feminist course.”41 Professor McKay was my
instructor at Simmons College, and she introduced me to black feminist thought.
By 1990, feminist readings had become standard for many critics in the acad-
emy, although lesbian readings still had not. The publication of Henry Louis Gates,
Jr.’s Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (1990) brought together
a diverse collection of critical essays in which curiously missing is Barbara Smith’s
essay on Toni Morrison’s Sula. Marianne Hirsch’s essay “Cruel Enough to Stop the
Blood” appears instead of Smith’s lesbian reading. In this essay Hirsch “illustrates
the relationship between feminism and the maternal through a brief look at the
tradition of contemporary black women’s writing that defines itself as a daughterly
tradition in relation to a complicated maternal past.”42 While a reading from the
daughterly position is important, far more revealing is the relationship between
Sula and Nel. Many readers have no real understanding of Sula, but a lesbian
critique brings her personality into full focus. Nonetheless, far too many hetero-
sexual black women and men wear blinders and refuse to acknowledge multiple
sexualities. Thus, even otherwise excellent readings and analyses contain certain
incongruities and distortions. For example, Mary Helen Washington’s approaches
for teaching Black women writers list three categories of women characters: the
Suspended Woman, the Assimilated Woman and the Emergent Woman.43 It seems
curious that Sula would be categorized as the Suspended Woman because she
definitely is not, as Washington claims using Hurston’s words, “a mule of the
world.”44 She is not subjected to nor destroyed by violence in the ways that the
other characters in the section are: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Nannie in Hurs-
ton’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Lutie in Petry’s The Street (1946), Mem
in Walker’s The Third Life (1970), or Pauline in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).
Sula is the sole character not explained by Washington’s paradigm.
While some writers either knowingly or unknowingly shied away from present-
ing multiple sexual identities, others clearly embraced all of the various aspects
of Black womanhood. Among the earliest within the context of the second-wave
feminist movement was Ann Allen Shockley. Her lesbian fiction Loving Her (1974)
garnered harsh criticism from the then masculinist Black Nationalists, but more
shocking than their myopic and sexist critique was the temerity of Frank Lamont
41 Nellie Y. McKay quoted in Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (ed.): Words of Fire: An Anthology of

African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press 1995, p. 451.
42 Hirsch, Marianne: “Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood.” In: Gates, Henry Louis (ed.):
Reading Black, Reading Feminist. New York: Penguin 1990, p. 415.
43 Washington, “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans” in Gates 1990, p. 22.
44 The term comes from Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Philips, a student and classmate, to label Shockley’s work “bullshit” and have his
review of the book published in an issue of Black World.45 Shockley was not to be
silenced, however. In 1985, she published Say Jesus and Come to Me. Ten years had
made something of a difference, and this time the reviews were less vicious. After
all, by 1985, Gloria Naylor had published The Women of Brewster Place (1982) with
its two lesbian lovers, and Alice Walker had introduced the world to the lesbian
lovers Shug and Celie. Yet there were still silences among those who write about
and analyze the works of Black feminist writers. In the groundbreaking anthol-
ogy Reading Black, Reading Feminist, only Barbara Christian deals seriously with
the lesbian characters Lorraine and Theresa in Naylor’s first novel, The Women
of Brewster Place.46
The one writer that forces a critical conversation about and critique of lesbian
feminist characters is Alice Walker. She has risen to the challenge posed by black
lesbian feminists to imagine multiple ways of being a black woman in the world.
From the love scenes between Celie and Shug in The Color Purple to the torrid
lovemaking of Susannah and Pauline in By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Walker
has pushed back the parameters restricting black women’s lives and what black
women write about. The response has not been unexpected. Richard Bernstein’s
New York Times Review called By the Light of My Father’s Smile “Limp New-Age
Nonsense in Mexico,” a judgment which is reminiscent of Phillip’s condemnation
of Shockley’s novel as “bullshit.”47 What this type of criticism does is issue a call
for more feminist critics, yet there is the silence of which Lorde warned—the
tyrannies. To date no serious analysis of lesbians in Walker’s fiction has appeared
beyond the massive critical response to The Color Purple.
In “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,”48 Audre Lorde has written movingly
of the erotic as power. She distinguished between the erotic and the pornograph-
45 Phillips, Frank Lamont. Review of Loving Her, by Ann Allen Shockley. Black World
XXIV 1975, pp. 89–90.
46 The anthology contains nine essays under the heading “Constructing a Tradition,” in-
cluding those by Barbara Christian, Mary Helen Washington and Michelle. Seventeen
essays comprise the section “Reading Black, Reading Feminist.” These cover the works
of Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Lorraine Hansberry, Gloria Naylor, Gwendolyn Brooks
and Sonia Sanchez. The final section includes interviews with Rita Dove and Jamaica
Kincaid.
47 Bernstein, Richard: “Limp New-Age Nonsense in Mexico.” New York Times October
7, 1998, retrieved 17.10.2015, from https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/daily/
walker-book-review.html.
48 Lorde, Audre: “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” In: Zami/Sister Outsider/
Undersong 1993, pp. 53–59.
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On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided
between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when
her friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and
agreeable chat, through the grating, with ladies whose
conversation was not always confined to spiritual topics.
Grievously did her conscience smite her for such unfaithfulness,
and bitterly does she regret the laxity of her confessors, who
failed to tell her that it was a heinous crime.
In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental
prayer, and for the next twenty years continued it, with many
inward vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions
on the part of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is
memorable as the season of her entrance on those higher
experiences, which have made her name famous as the great
revivalist of supernatural prayer and mystical devotion in the
sixteenth century.
The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our
saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at
Avila, established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that
convent wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order
was to be restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed
prioress (against her will, as usual),—where there shall be no
chats at the grating, no rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent
virgins’ shall dwell there, discalceated (that is sandalled not
shod), serge-clad, flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but
perpetually dumb.[268] The remainder of her life, from about her
fiftieth year, would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in
marvellous experiences. She was now recognised as the
foundress of the Reformed Carmelites, and could produce
warrant from Rome, authorizing her to found as many convents
of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was harassed by the
jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but indefatigably
befriended by John of the Cross, and other thorough-going
ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen nunneries of the
Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of the same rule.
She has left us a long history of her foundations, of all the
troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds were
often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition
were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy
for many visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.
In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced

the reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of
her confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid
bare without reserve. The narrative was published by her
superiors, and therein the heretic may listen to what she
whispered in the ear of her director during the years most prolific
in extravagance. We can thus discern the working of the
confessional. Commanded to disclose her most secret thoughts,
we see her nervously afraid of omitting to indicate the minutest
variations of the religious thermometer, of approaching the
committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only can commit
—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in
herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of
the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into
something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into
her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected
every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her
memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture,
she must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what
faculties were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the
mind were tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the
possession of her sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She
confesses that she found her understanding rather in the way
than otherwise.[269] Under this omnipresent spiritual despotism it
fell prostrate utterly. When she has been favoured with a vision,
she is not to know whether it has steamed up from hell or been
let down from heaven, until the decision of her confessor fills her
with horror or delight. The cloister is her universe. Her mind,
unformed, and uninformed, is an empty room, papered with
leaves from her breviary. She knew little of that charity which
makes gracious inroads on the outer world; which rendered
human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire and pity in
Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No
feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending,
no ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later
years brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’
persons. Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the
mitigation of suffering. It made many monks and nuns
uncomfortable; but I am not aware that it made any sinners
better, or any wretched happy. Peter of Alcantara is her
admiration; he who for forty years never slept more than one
hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in a sitting posture,
with his head against a wooden peg in the wall; who ate in
general only every third day; and who looked, she says, as if he
were made of the roots of trees (hecho de reyzes de arboles[270]).
Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she convulses herself
with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all things and
persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to reduce the
too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible compass,
and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or entozoön—in
the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is this suicide,
she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and incessantly
asks him if he is quite sure that she is sincere. Such a life is an
object of compassion more than blame. She was herself the
victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a
new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about
her Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from
the first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that
time, who beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of
what they desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from
one of these guides would be translated by such an imagination
into a direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a
spring, and her excitable nature was surrounded with the
phantasmagoria of vision; one scene produced another, and that
unfolded into more—all, the reiteration and expansion of the bent
once given to her fixed idea.
Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the Veni
Creator, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of
her heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but
angels.‘[271] She had been conscious, on several previous
occasions, of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much
perplexed thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors.
Here were irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no
rule ready. They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle
against such extraordinary influences. But the more she resists,
the more does the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories,
heap on her favours and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis
Borgia comes to Avila. The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and
she goes on the mystical way rejoicing. The first rapture took
place shortly after her interviews with the future General of the
Society of Jesus.
A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital
question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the
duty of implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more
constantly inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of
the Cross, and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the
principle more apparent. John warns the mystic that his only
safeguard against delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved
appeal to his director. Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord
commanded her in prayer to do anything, and her confessor
ordered the opposite, the Divine guide enjoined obedience to the
human; and would influence the mind of the confessor
afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he had before
forbidden![272] Of course. For who knows what might come of it if
enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their own
account? The director must draw after him these fiery and
dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry
conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates.
The question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism
of the fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine.
The same question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply
one of ecclesiastical interests.[273] The condemned quietists were
merely mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw
material, and as such flung into the fire. Out of the very same
substance, duly wrought and fashioned, might have come a saint
like Theresa. By the great law of Romish policy, whatever cannot
be made to contribute to her ornament or defence is straightway
handed over to the devil. Accordingly, the only mysticism
acknowledged by that Church grows up beneath her walls, and
invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her garrison,—
resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier town,
that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all the
panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render
tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that
shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry
thee off captive to their home of dolour!
The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her
counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and
grievously suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She
knew others also who had endured much through similar
incompetency. The judgment of one conductor was reversed by
his successor. She exhorts her nuns to the greatest care in the
selection of a confessor,—on no account to choose a vain man
or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to change him when
they deem it desirable.[274] John of the Cross, too, dilates on the
mischief which may be done by an inexperienced spiritual guide.
At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign of the
cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the
appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[275] Her
next guide assured her that the form she beheld was no
delusion. Dreadful discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to
exorcise her Lord; but the virtue of obedience had blotted out the
sin of blasphemy. Thus does each small infallibility mould her for
his season, and then pass her on to another. Her soul, with
despair stamped on one side and glory imaged on the other,
spins dizzy in the air; and whether, when it comes down, heaven
or hell shall be uppermost, depends wholly upon the twist of the
ecclesiastical thumb.
But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to those
of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she was
favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in hell:
—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of vermin,
where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the walls
seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling, burning;
where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor, tearing
itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense, that all
she had endured from racking disease was delightful in
comparison.[276]
At another time, while smitten for five hours together with
intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand
that she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side
like a very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last
she contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he
was. That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her
body remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as
well to know that holy water will be found incomparably your best
weapon in such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may
presently return. The drops the Church has blest, do their
business effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the
victory just related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with
manifest disgust, and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once
the sisters heard distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving
her, though she, in a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of
his belabouring. The said devil squatted one day on her breviary,
and at another time had all but strangled her.[277] She once saw,
with the eye of her soul, two devils, encompassing, with their
meeting horns, the neck of a sinful priest; and at the funeral of a
man who had died without confession, a whole swarm of devils
tearing and tossing the body and sporting in the grave.
But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her
visions of celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells
us, ‘our Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of
excessive and indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face,
and finally, at mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his
appearances, he drew out with his right hand, the nail which
transfixed his left, some of the flesh following it. Three times did
she behold in her raptures the most sublime of all visions—the
humanity of Christ in the bosom of the Father; very clear to her
mind, but impossible to explain. While reciting the Athanasian
Creed the mystery of the Trinity was unfolded to her, with
unutterable wonderment and comfort. Our Lord paid her, one
day, the compliment of saying, that if He had not already created
heaven, He would have done so for her sake alone.[278]
Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious
examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With
all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us.
But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury
under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea
every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it
assume a form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa.
Repeatedly does she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ
as actually within the interior part of their soul. The superstition of
the mass contributed largely in her case to render this idea
concrete and palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous
inspiration after swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes
God as her prisoner.[279] She relates in the following passage
how she saw the figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-
glass.
‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul
suddenly lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me
as a bright mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and
bottom, was perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented
to me Christ our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed
to see him in all the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror,
and at the same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it)
was all engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication
exceeding amorous which I cannot describe. I know that this
vision was of great advantage to me, and has been every time I
have called it to mind, more especially after communion. I was
given to understand, that when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror
is covered with a great cloud, and grows very dark, so that the
Lord cannot be seen or represented in us, though he is always
present as the Author of our being. In heretics, this mirror is as it
were broken, which is much worse than to have it obscured.’[280]
Here the simplicitas and nuditas of other mystics become a kind
of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de
Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further,
and good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ
on the cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a
post-mortem examination, completely formed inside her heart.
[281]
Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was

sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart,
tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her
bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated,
she was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[282]
A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the
Lord gave her a cross of precious stones—a matchless
specimen of celestial jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after
communion one day, her mouth was full of blood, that ran out
over her dress, and Christ told her it was his own—shed afresh,
with great pain, to reward her for the gratification her devotion
had afforded him; how (doubtless in imitation of Catherine of
Siena) she saw and heard a great white dove fluttering above
her head; and how, finally, she repays the attentions of the Jesuit
Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order; by recording visions of
Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of Jesuits, sword in
hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing down heretics;
and by predicting the great things to be accomplished through
the zeal of that body.[283] Enough!
Note to page 159.
The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a
century (1670-1730), concerning the Mistica Ciudad de Dios,
attributed to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of
the character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This
monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a
Spanish nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both
assertions are made, and the difference is not material. Its object is
to establish, by pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives
assigned to the Queen of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate
Conception. It is replete with the absurdities and indecencies of
prurient superstition. Dufresnoy applies to it, with justice, the words
of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit impudens et in facie erubescentium
populorum genialis thori revelat et denudat arcana.’ It states that the
embryo of the Virgin was formed on a Sunday, seventeen days
before the ordinary time,—relates how, at eighteen months, the
infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the colour worn by
the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine
hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book
maintained, not only that the work itself was a miracle from
beginning to end, but that its translation was miraculous also,—a
French nun receiving instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue,
that these disclosures from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such
was the mass of corruption about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-
borne beetles’ of the Church settled in contending swarms. This was
the book on whose wholesomeness for the flock of Christ his Vicars
could not venture to decide—eventually, rather evading reply than
pronouncing sentence. No such scruple concerning the
unwholesomeness of the Bible.
The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the
combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party
motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should
encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish
ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman,
retorted with a Censura Censuræ. But about the habit the battle was
hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for
had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin
wore a dress of their colour? The Franciscans again, and the
religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages
authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not
these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist
doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist
would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an
examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, Traité Historique
et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations
particulières, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).
The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after
he had written his Guida Spirituale, he was patronized by the Jesuits
because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the
Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it,
because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by
speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.
CHAPTER II.
Indeed, when persons have been long softened with the

continual droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous
and apt for impression by the assiduity of prayer, and perpetual
alarms of death, and the continual dyings of mortification,—the
fancy, which is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept
continually warm, and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire,
and to flame out in great ascents; and when they suffer
transportations beyond the burdens and support of reason, they
suffer they know not what, and call it what they please.—Jeremy
Taylor.
I. Saint Theresa—(CONTINUED).
What disinterested love is to the mysticism of Fénelon, that is

supernatural passive prayer to the mysticism of St. Theresa. She
writes to describe her experience in the successive stages of
prayer; to distinguish them, and to lay down directions for those
who are their subjects. She professes no method whereby souls
may be conducted from the lowest to the highest degree. On the
contrary, she warns all against attempting to attain, by their own
efforts, that blissful suspension of the powers which she depicts
in colours so glowing. Unlike Dionysius, she counsels no effort to
denude the soul of thought: she does not, with Tauler, bid the
mystic laboriously sink into the ground of his being. She is
emphatically a Quietist; quite as much so as Molinos, far more
so than Fénélon. Spiritual consolation and spiritual desertion are
to be alike indifferent. By a singular inconsistency, while tracing
out the way of perfection, she forbids the taking of a step in that
path.[284] You will be borne along, she would say, if you wait, as
far as is fitting. Her experience receives its complexion, and
some of her terminology is borrowed from the Lives of the
Saints. Of the past career of Mystical Theology she is utterly
ignorant. She hears, indeed, of a certain time-honoured division
of the mystical process into Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive;
but she does not adopt the scheme. The Platonic and
philosophic element is absent altogether from her mysticism. Her
metaphysics are very simple:—the soul has three powers—
Understanding, Memory, and Will. Now one, now another, now
all of these, are whelmed and silenced by the incoming flood of
Divine communication.
In addition to sundry chapters in her Life on the various kinds of
prayer, she has left two treatises, The Way of Perfection (Camino
de Perfecion) and The Castle of the Soul (Castillo Interior)—
verbose, rambling, full of repetitions. For the conventual mind
there is no rotation of crops; and the barrenness which limits
such monotonous reproduction supervenes very soon. From
these sources, then, we proceed to a brief summary of her
theopathy.
There are in her scale four degrees of prayer. The first is Simple
Mental Prayer,—fervent, inward, self-withdrawn; not exclusive of
some words, nor unaided by what the mystics called discursive
acts, i.e., the consideration of facts and doctrines prompting to
devotion. In this species there is nothing extraordinary. No
mysticism, so far.
Second Degree:—The Prayer of Quiet called also Pure
Contemplation. In this state the Will is absorbed, though the
Understanding and Memory may still be active in an ordinary
way. Thus the nun may be occupied for a day or two in the usual
religious services, in embroidering an altar-cloth, or dusting a
chapel; yet without the Will being engaged. That faculty is
supposed to be, as it were, bound and taken up in God. This
stage is a supernatural one. Those who are conscious of it are to
beware lest they suffer the unabsorbed faculties to trouble them.
Yet they should not exert themselves to protract this
‘recollection.’ They should receive the wondrous sweetness as it
comes, and enjoy it while it lasts, absolutely passive and tranquil.
The devotee thus favoured often dreads to move a limb, lest
bodily exertion should mar the tranquillity of the soul. But
happiest are those who, as in the case just mentioned, can be
Marys and Marthas at the same time.[285]
Third Degree:—The Prayer of Union, called also Perfect
Contemplation. In this prayer, not the Will only, but the
Understanding and Memory also, are swallowed up in God.
These powers are not absolutely inactive; but we do not work
them, nor do we know how they work. It is a kind of celestial
frenzy—‘a sublime madness,’ says Theresa. In such a transport
she composed her ecstatic hymn, without the least exercise of
the understanding on her part. At this stage the contemplatist
neither thinks nor feels as a human being. The understanding is
stunned and struck dumb with amazement. The heart knows
neither why it loves, nor what. All the functions of the mind are
suspended. Nothing is seen, heard, or known. And wherefore
this sudden blank? That for a brief space (which seems always
shorter than it really is) the Living God may, as it were, take the
place of the unconscious spirit—that a divine vitality may for a
moment hover above the dead soul, and then vanish without a
trace; restoring the mystic to humanity again, to be heartened
and edified, perhaps for years to come, by the vague memory of
that glorious nothingness.[286]
Some simple nun might ask, ‘How do you know that God did so
plenarily enter into you, if you were conscious of nothing
whatever?’
‘My daughter,’ replies the saint, ‘I know it by an infallible certainty
(una certidumbre) that God alone bestows.’[287]
After this nothing remains to be said.
Fourth Degree:—The Prayer of Rapture, or Ecstasy. This
estate is the most privileged, because the most unnatural of all.
The bodily as well as mental powers are sunk in a divine stupor.
You can make no resistance, as you may possibly, to some
extent, in the Prayer of Union. On a sudden your breath and
strength begin to fail; the eyes are involuntarily closed, or, if
open, cannot distinguish surrounding objects; the hands are
rigid; the whole body cold.
Alas! what shall plain folk do among the rival mystics!
Swedenborg tells us that bodily cold is the consequence of
defective faith: Theresa represents it as the reward of faith’s
most lofty exercise.
Were you reading, meditating, or praying, previous to the
seizure, the book, the thought, the prayer, are utterly forgotten.
For that troublesome little gnat, the memory (esta maraposilla
importuna de la memoria), has burnt her wings at the glory. You
may look on letters—you cannot read a word; hear speech—you
understand nothing. You cannot utter a syllable, for the strength
is gone. With intense delight, you find that all your senses are
absolutely useless—your spiritual powers inoperative in any
human mode. The saint is not quite certain whether the
understanding, in this condition, understands; but she is sure
that, if it does, it understands without understanding, and that its
not understanding cannot be understood. Time of this beatific
vacuum,—very long, if half an hour; though obviously a difficult
point to decide, as you have no senses to reckon by.
Remarkable were the effects of the rapture on the body of the
saint. An irrepressible lifting force seemed to carry her off her
feet (they preserve the right foot in Rome to this day): it was the
swoop of an eagle; it was the grasp of a giant. In vain, she tells
us, did she resist. Generally the head, sometimes the whole
body, was supernaturally raised into the air! On one occasion,
during a sermon on a high day, in the presence of several ladies
of quality, the reckless rapture took her. For in vain had she
prayed that these favours might not be made public. She cast
herself on the ground. The sisters hastened to hold her down;
yet the upward struggling of the divine potency was manifest to
all. Imagine the rush of the sisterhood, the screams of the ladies
of quality, the pious ejaculations from the congregation,—
watching that knot of swaying forms, wrestling with miracle, and
the upturned eyes, or open-mouthed amazement, of the
interrupted preacher![288]
The state of rapture is frequently accompanied by a certain
‘great pain’ (gran pena), a sweet agony and delicious torment,
described by Theresa in language as paradoxical as that which
Juliet in her passion applies to the lover who has slain her cousin
—
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove-feathered raven! wolfish-ravening lamb!
After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined

spiritual and corporeal torture, the sisters would find her almost
without pulsation, the bones of the arms standing out (las
canillas muy abiertas), her hands stiff and extended: in every
joint were the pains of dislocation: she was apparently at the
point of death.[289]
This mysterious ‘pain’ is no new thing in the history of mysticism.
It is one of the trials of mystical initiation. It is the depth essential
to the superhuman height. With St. Theresa, the physical nature
contributes towards it much more largely than usual; and in her
map of the mystic’s progress it is located at a more advanced
period of the journey. St. Francis of Assisi lay sick for two years
under the preparatory miseries. Catharine of Siena bore five
years of privation, and was tormented by devils beside. For five
years, and yet again for more than three times five, Magdalena
de Pazzi endured such ‘aridity,’ that she believed herself
forsaken of God. Balthazar Alvarez suffered for sixteen years
before he earned his extraordinary illumination.[290] Theresa,
there can be little doubt, regarded her fainting-fits, hysteria,
cramps, and nervous seizures, as divine visitations. In their
action and reaction, body and soul were continually injuring each
other. The excitement of hallucination would produce an attack of
her disorder, and the disease again foster the hallucination.
Servitude, whether of mind or body, introduces maladies
unknown to freedom. Elephantiasis and leprosy—the scourge of
modern Greece—were unknown to ancient Hellas. The cloister
breeds a family of mental distempers, elsewhere unheard of.
The mystics generally, from Dionysius downward, inculcate
earnest endeavours to denude the mind of images, to suspend
its reflex or discursive operations. Theresa goes a step farther,
and forbids her pupils to strive towards such a state. If such a
favour is to be theirs, it will be wrought in them as by
enchantment. Passivity here reaches its extreme. On this ground
a charge of Quietism might have been brought against Theresa
with more justice than against Fénélon, or even Molinos. The
Guida Spirituale of Molinos was designed to assist the mystic in
attaining that higher contemplation of God which rises above the
separate consideration of particular attributes. This indistinct and
dazzled apprehension of all the perfections together is the very
characteristic of Theresa’s Prayer of Rapture. Molinos cites her
very words. The introduction to his condemned manual contains
some very strong expressions. But nothing of his own is so
extravagant as the passages from Dionysius and Theresa.
Who then is the Quietist—Molinos or Theresa? Both write books
to mark out the mystic’s pathway. Theresa adds the caution, ‘Sit
still.’ Manifestly, then, the excess of passivity lies with her. The
oars of Molinos are the sails of Theresa,—erected, like the broad
paddles of the Indian, to catch the breeze, and urge onward the
canoe without an effort.[291] But the followers of Molinos were
found guilty of neglecting ceremonial gewgaws for devout
abstraction,—of escaping those vexatious observances so
harassing to patients and so lucrative to priests. So Rome
condemned him, and not Theresa, as the Quietist heretic. For his
head the thundercloud; for hers the halo.[292]
Here the reader may naturally ask, ‘How do these mystics
reconcile such extremes of abstraction and such extremes of
sensuousness? If the state above symbols and above reasoning
—above all conscious mental operations, distinctions, or figures,
be so desirable (as they all admit),—must not crucifixes, images,
and pictures of saints, yea, the very conception of our Saviour’s
humanity itself, be so many hindrances?’
To this Theresa would answer, ‘I thought so once. But I was
happily led to see my error ere long. In the Prayer of Rapture, all
recognition of Christ’s humanity—as, indeed, of everything else
—is doubtless obliterated. But, then, we do not effect this. There
is no effort on our part to remove from our minds the conception
of Christ’s person. The universal nescience of Rapture is
supernaturally wrought, without will of ours.’[293] John of the
Cross, who carries his negative, imageless abstraction so far, is
fain (as a good son of the Church) to insert a special chapter in
commendation of images, pictures, and the sensuous aids to
devotion generally. It was unfortunate for the flesh and blood of
Molinos that he failed to do the same.[294]
In the seventeenth century the Quietists were accused of
rejecting the idea of Christ’s humanity, as a corporeal image
which would only mar their supersensuous contemplation of
abstract deity. Bossuet attempted to fasten the charge on
Fénélon: it was one of the hottest points of their controversy.
Fénélon completely clears himself. From the evidence within my
reach, I am disposed to acquit Molinos also.[295]
Theresa relates with peculiar pleasure those passages in the
marvellous history of the soul in which surpassing heights of
knowledge, or of virtue, are supposed to be realized, on the
instant, without processes or media. No transition is too violent
for her faith. She is impatient of all natural growth; will
acknowledge no conditions of development. The sinner turns into
a seraph in the twinkling of an eye. The splendid symmetry of all
the Christian virtues can arise, like the palace of Aladdin, in a
single night. In one particular kind of Rapture—the Flight of the
Soul (Buelo del Espiritu), the soul is described by her as, in a
manner, blown up. It is discharged heavenwards by a soundless
but irresistible explosive force from beneath, swift as a bullet
(con la presteza que sale la pelota de un arcabuz). Thus
transported the spirit is taught without the medium of words, and
understands mysteries which long years of search could not
even have surmised.[296]
Visions are intellectual or representative. The former is a
consciousness of spiritual proximity, indescribable,
unaccompanied by any appearances. The representative or
imaginative vision, presents some definite form or image.[297]
There is a kind of supernatural tuition, she tells us, in which the
Lord suddenly places in the centre of the soul, what he wishes it
to understand, without words or representation of any kind. This
privilege Theresa compares very truly to an ability to read
without having learnt letters, or to nutriment derived from food
without eating it.[298] In other instances certain efficacious words
(the ‘substantial words’ of John), are spoken divinely in the
centre of the soul, and immediately produce there the actual
effects proper to their significance.[299] If something is thus
inwardly spoken about humility, for example, the subject of such
words is that moment completely humble. So the soul is supplied
with virtues as the tables volantes of Louis XV. with viands,—a
spring is touched, and presto! the table sinks and re-appears—
spread.
Note to page 168.
Theresa compares the four degrees of prayer to four ways of

watering the soul-garden: the first, to drawing water out of a well; the
second, to raising it by means of a rope with buckets (less laborious
and more plentiful); the third, to the introduction of a rivulet; and the
fourth, to a copious shower, whereby God Himself abundantly waters
the garden, without any effort of ours.—Cap. xi. p. 67. The second
degree is fully described in the fourteenth chapter of her life, and in
the thirty-first of the Camino de Perfecion.
The difference between the first degree and the three others is
simply that generic distinction between Meditation and
Contemplation with which the earlier mystics have made us familiar.
Theresa’s second, third, and fourth degrees of prayer are her more
loose and practical arrangement of the species of contemplation.
She identifies Mystical Theology with Prayer, employing the latter
term in a very comprehensive sense. So also does St. Francis de
Sales:—En somme, l’oraison et théologie mystique n’est autre chose
qu’une conversation par laquelle l’âme s’entretient amoureusement
avec Dieu de sa très-aimable bonté pour s’unir et joindre à icelle.—
Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vi. chap. i. He likens the soul in the
prayer of Quiet when the will is engaged but the other powers free,
to an infant which can see and hear and move its arms, while
adhering to the breast. The babe which removes its little mouth from
the bosom to see where its feet are, resembles those who are
distracted in the prayer of Quiet by self-consciousness, and disturb
their repose by curiosity as to what the mind is doing the while.—
Ibid. chap. x.
Note to page 170.
Vida, capp. xviii. xix.:—Estandoassi el alma buscando a Dios, siente

con un deleyte grandissimo y suave casi desfallecerse toda con una
manera de desmayo, que le va faltando el huelgo, y todas las
fuerças corporales, demanera que sino es con mucha pena, no
puede aun menear las manos; los ojos se le cierran sin querer, los
cerrar, y si los tiene abiertos no vee casi nada; ni si lee, acierta a
dezir letra ni casi atina a conocerla bien; vee que ay letra, mas como
el entendimiento no ayuda, no sabe leer, aunque quiera. Oye, mas
no entiende lo que oye. Assi que de los sentidos no se aprovecha
nada, sino es para no la acabar de dexar a su plazer, y assi antes la
dañan. Hablar, es por de mas, que no atina a formar palabra; ni ay
fuerça ya que atinasse, para poderla pronunciar: porque toda la
fuerça exterior se pierde, y se aumenta en las del alma, para mejor
poder gozar de su gloria. El deleyte exterior que se siente es
grande, y muy conocido.—P. 118.
As to the elevation of the body in the air during rapture, it is common
enough in the annals of Romish saintship, and a goodly page might
be filled with the mere names of the worthies who are represented
as overcoming not only sin, but gravitation. Maria d’Agreda was
seen, times without number, poised on nothing in a recumbent
attitude, in an equilibrium so delicate, that by blowing, even at a
distance, she was made to waft this way or that, like a feather.
Dominic of Jesu Maria had the honour of being blown about, while in
this soap-bubble condition, by the heretic-slaying breath of Philip II.
Görres furnishes a long list of examples, and believes them all; Die
Christliche Mystik, Buch. v. iv. § 2.
It is curious to see how Francis de Sales, who follows Theresa
somewhat closely in his chapter on the Prayer of Quietude, grows
wisely cautious as he treats of Rapture, softens down extravagance,
avoids theurgy, and keeps to piety, and admirably substitutes
practical devotion for the unintelligibility and the materialism of the
Spanish saint. He enumerates three kinds of Rapture or ecstasy
(ravissement and extase are identical),—that of the intellect, that of
the affection, and that of action,—manifested, respectively, by glory,
by fervour, and by deed,—realized by admiration, by devotion, and
by operation. On the last he dwells most fully; on that he
concentrates all his exhortations. To live without profaneness, he
says, without falsehood, without robbery, to honour parents, to obey
law, to reverence God,—this is to live according to the natural reason
of man. But to embrace poverty, to hail reproach and persecution as
blessings, and martyrdom as joy, by unceasing self-renunciation, to
forsake the world, surmount its opinion, deny its rule,—this is to live,
not humanly, but superhumanly;—to live out of ourselves and above
ourselves, by supernatural energy,—this is to enjoy the noblest
ecstasy, not of a moment, but of a life-time. Many saints have died
without enjoying ecstatic trance—all have lived the ecstatic life.—
Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, livre vii. chapp. iii. and vii.
Note to page 170.
This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the Life,

and in the Castillo Interior, Morada vi. capp. 1 and 2. In the former
place she gives a kind of rationale thereof, in the following words:—
Parece me que esta assi el alma, que ni del cielo le viene consuelo,
ni esta en el; ni de la tierra le quiere, ni esta en ella; sino como
crucificada entre el cielo y la tierra, padeciendo sin venirle socorro di
ningun cabo. Porque el que le viene del cielo (que es como he dicho

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Black Feminist Literary Criticism

Black Feminist Literary Criticism

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Black Feminist Literary Criticism

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This, then, is at the heart of what contemporary African Americanists Michael

Note on Contributors............................................................................................... 159

Select Bibliography................................................................................................... 161

On this note, several clarifications should be made. As is evident from DuCille’s

American Literary Criticism,” and Hortense J. Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s

The Writer as Critic in the Emergence

“What did it mean to be for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmoth-

and economic exploitation in New York City. Her determination is admirable.

Home Girls and Sister Outsider: The Roots of

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in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without

Second-Wave Black Feminism

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14 Audre Lorde quoted in Betsch Cole / Guy-Sheftall 2003, p. 41.

Black Feminist Literary Criticism

In 1977, Barbara Smith also published her groundbreaking challenge to black

as against the imposition of the European philosophical theories that were de

37 Lorde, Audre: Zami/Sister Outsider/Undersong. New York: Quality Paperback Book

41 Nellie Y. McKay quoted in Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (ed.): Words of Fire: An Anthology of

In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced

Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was

Note to page 159.

Indeed, when persons have been long softened with the

What disinterested love is to the mysticism of Fénelon, that is

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

After some two or three hours’ endurance of this combined

Note to page 168.

Theresa compares the four degrees of prayer to four ways of

Note to page 170.

Vida, capp. xviii. xix.:—Estandoassi el alma buscando a Dios, siente

Note to page 170.

This pain is described by Theresa in the twentieth chapter of the Life,

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