Wang: Besides “Race” or “Racial issues” in the study of African American
literary criticism, “Gender issues,” or “Gender equality” has been foregrounded
at least since the 1970s. What do you think of different approaches/aspects in
black feminism and their possible tendencies in the new century?
Ward: Any thinking I do in this area
of cultural study is centered on womanism not feminism, because Alice Walker’s
making a distinction between the womanist and feminist perspectives was a key
moment in intellectual history.[1]
Her distinction is a warrant for investigating gender as a thread of concern
interwoven with other threads we call class, biology, race, and ethnicity, of
seeing the fabric through the lens of American history. Inspecting the 19th
century fabric and texture enables us to find similar patterns in the literary
criticism that has been manufactured since the 1970s.
Discussions of gender in the North were apparent in abolitionist debates
about the evils of enslaving Africans and African Americans, and those debates
were enlarged by proposals from the Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848. In the
antebellum South, black women inscribed their gender issues in the narratives
they wrote or dictated, in oral traditions, in successful flights to
freedom. After the American Civil War,
African American women wrote what Claudia Tate aptly named “domestic allegories
of political desire,” were exceptionally active in promoting literary and
education, and in disputing with white feminists that women’s rights pertained
to women as a class; in these quarrels we discern how race and economic status
made gender equality problematic. Leap to 1920.
American women finally got the right to vote, but that political gesture
left many gender and racial issues unresolved.
Just as abolitionist efforts in the 19th century provided
models for women’s assertive actions, so too did the long struggle of African
American women (notably Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker ) and
men for civil rights provide a template for political and literary actions
among women, the upsurge of Women’s Liberation and feminist theorizing which
smashed against the every-present wall of
race, ethnic, and class interests and the immense capability of
globalization to reinforce abuses of women.
Cultural critics should use the discipline of history to study the
fragmentation and bifurcation of feminism and womanism. We should learn from
such twentieth-century writers, scholars and critics as Trudier Harris, Carolyn
Fowler, Farah Frances Smith Foster, Gloria T. Hull, Audre Lorde, Jacqueline
Jones Royster, Deborah McDowell, Darlene Clark Hine, Elizabeth McHenry, Claudia
Tate, Nell Irvin Painter, Andree Nicola McLaughlin, Nellie McKay, Joanne V. Gabbin, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sherley Anne
Williams, Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Thadious M.
Davis, Hortense Spillers, Maryemma Graham, Barbara Christian and dozens of
other women ----all of whom worked assiduously to build foundations for
twenty-first- century work.
In a near future, the tendency in African American literary criticism
may lean toward androgyny, more exploration of gender’s bending and blending
without minimizing the need to use literary knowledge in substantive critiques
of material conditions perpetuated by the gendered rhetorics of public policy,
sex traffic and religious bondage, of the gap between wealth and poverty in the
African Diaspora and everywhere else, and of the now permanent threat of amoral terrorism.
I would hope that significantly more attention would be given to excellent
qualities in women’s minds and their
contributions to science, sports, statespersonship, and life-affirming literature
and culture and less to shameless praise of women’s bodies in the transnational neo-slave auctions of “beauty
pageants.” This new century offers many
opportunities to spend our enormous intellectual capital wisely, particularly
in efforts to minimize the cruelties human beings inflict upon human
beings. Many of our colleagues would
argue rigorously that such is not the responsibility of scholars. If they are right and I am wrong, I shall
hold fast to my heresy and transgressions.
