The Other 80s Revival: On African-American Women's Literary Tradition
1.01.2006 | Perin Gurel | The Academy

In 1892, Frederick Douglass, when asked to name some black women authors for inclusion in a reference book, notoriously remarked, �I have thus seen no book of importance written by a Negro woman� (Fraser 23). What a difference a century has made! In 1988, the first 30 volumes of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women were published under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and included the works of the first African-American poet (Phillis Wheatley) and the first African American essayist to publish a book (Ann Plato), both women. The same year, Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In fact, the 1980s literary market seemed so noticeably peppered by the well-received works of black women from Toni Morrion to Alice Walker to Maya Angelou (as well as reprints of Zora Neale Hurston and several new anthologies of black women's fiction) that even a casual observer would have heartily disagreed with Douglass. After all, in 1990, a New York Times article credited the flourishing of the study of African-American Literature in the academia to the �success of such [female] writers as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker� � never mind the Race Men and the defiantly masculine Black Arts movement of the late 60s (Begley 24.)

It is indeed a strange temporal trajectory from the last decades of the 20 th century, when Audre Lorde was told that �if [she] wanted to write a novel this was the time� since publishers wanted books by black woman authors to the two decades between 1890 and 1910 when black women published more works of fiction than black men had in the previous half century (Lorde 142; Gates �Foreword� xvi). It is also no accident that the 1980s celebration of works by black women such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, however politically complex, coincided with the unearthing and reprinting of long-forgotten works by early African American women authors, described by Hazel Carby in 1987 as �black women's renaissance� (7). This post-feminist and post-civil rights establishment of a �matrilineal literary tradition� as an afterthought, which Gates has argued �means, in the most strictly literal sense, that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilineal line of descent, and that each, consciously or unconsciously, has extended and revised a canon whose foundation was the poetry of a black woman,� however, remains as problematic as it is romantic (x). This paper seeks to outline some of the problems inherent in this historically specific scholarly establishment/unveiling of a matrilineal African-American literary tradition and then asks for a critical reconsideration of the role of temporality, essentialism and intertextuality in canon formation.

Not included among the books published under the Schomburg Library collection were Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, the first published novel by an African-American and the recently discovered, unpublished manuscript The Bondswoman's Narrative , both rescued from obscurity by Gates in 1982 and 2002 respectively and both exemplifying the essential difficulty inherent in tracing a matrilineal line of African-American literature: obscurity of text and author. As the research necessary for the validation of the authors of Our Nig and The Bondswoman's Narrative as black women demonstrates, the very fixing of an author as black and female is in itself a major struggle. Jean Fagan Yellin, outlining her research methods for her biography of Harriet A. Jacobs recently at a Yale conference put it most succinctly when she articulated the need to start research from a white person when the subject is black and from a man when the subject is a woman, which places black women doubly objectified and doubly obscure. Not much is known about the authors in the Schomburg collection: Kenny J. Williams, in his foreword to the work of Ann Plato unsatisfactorily and gloomily suggests that after writing the essays, Plato �might have disappeared somewhere in Europe. She may have moved to the West or to Canada. Or she may have died� (xliii). In researching the author of The Bondswoman's Narrative , Professor Gates was even unable to trace an actual black woman called Hannah Crafts, although he did locate her white male master. And for many years H.E. Wilson, the author of Our Nig was listed in reference works as white and male, that is, when the book was noted at all. Even though research in this area can be extremely rewarding when a discovery/authentication is made, fixing the race and gender of an author through historical documents is in itself an intellectually ambiguous project that smacks uncomfortably of essentialism.

And what is it exactly worth academically? In his foreword to the Schomburg series Gates writes, �literary works configure a tradition not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by race or gender, but because writers read other writers� (xviii.) Similarly Williams insists one must �try to place Ann Plato within the framework of her predecessors and followers� (li.) However, the concept of a literary tradition, even the existence of predecessors and followers remains problematic, given the historically determined obscurity of these early works by African-American women. Even as seminal a work as Our Nig was entirely ignored by the black and abolitionist press: not a single review acknowledged its publication. And while Ann Plato can be safely assumed to be influenced by Phillis Wheatley, whose earlier lines she rewrote in a poem, Anna Julia Cooper was obviously more influenced by Emerson than the earliest black female essayist Plato, whom she might not have even read (Williams xlviii.) In her canonical argument for a black feminist literary criticism, Barbara Smith argues, �for books to be real and remembered they have to be talked about� (133; my italics). Literature exists only when it is read and digested. Therefore, while it is tempting to dismiss Frederick Douglass's refusal to name a work of importance by black women as pure misogyny, the actual unavailability of such works was a historical, if unjust, fact.

The main problem in imagining a matrilineal African-American literary tradition then, is that such a tradition will always already be un-linear and non-chronological, afterthought. For most contemporary African-American woman authors, Hurston came before Wilson, and Brooks often preceded Harper. Maya Angelou is reported to have hailed the discovery of Our Nig �as the literary analogue for black women writers of Alex Haley's quest to find his African �roots'�: an emotionally charged journey into a misty past that is irreversibly obscured (qtd. in Gates, �Preface� vii). Theorizing within such a (re)constructed matrilineal African American tradition, we will always be tempted to slip into the essentalist and the Jungian, simply because Zora Neale Hurston probably never read Harriet E. Wilson. If a female black literary tradition exists, it is not merely accidentally �broken and sporadic�: such discontinuities are in fact fundamental elements that must be considered prior to any attempt at theorization (Gates, �Foreword� xi.)

If it was Hurston before Wilson, it was also Mary Helen Washington before it was Anna Julia Cooper . While African American literature historically reached its readers almost always framed by prefaces of white editors, letters from prominent abolitionists and those respectable white citizens who simply �knew� the author and could vouch for his or her black existence, African American studies inaugurated an additional level of intertextuality: scholarly prefaces. The influence of these and other secondary texts (articles, conference papers, critical introductions to publications), which often precede in time the reading of the primary text, is too potent to be ignored, in so far as they shape what reader-response critics call �the sequence of decisions, revisions, anticipations, reversals, and recoveries� that punctuate the reading act (Tompkins xvi). The connection between the last decades of the 19 th century, the age of the African American woman of letters, and the last decades of the 20 th , the age of feminist revisionism in African American studies rests here. Since every successful literary critical text is at the same time a plea for canon modification, a re- or de-centering of certain texts, a re-reading that is also a re-assertion of the text's gendered/racial/political importance. When we rethink the African-American literary tradition, we must do so with the awareness of African-American literary critical studies, which has taken the formation and validation of the canon, its subject of study, as a primary task. Isn't a Gates introduction as essential to our reception of a primary text as the notorious �To the Public� that preceded Phillis Wheatley's book of poetry, and, in an even more disturbing way, doesn't it serve the same purpose by assuring the reader that the author is black, female and �real�?

We might like to �work from the assumption that Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition� as Smith optimistically suggested in 1977, but we have to take into account how fractured such a tradition historically is, how it has been complicated by questions of authenticity and essentialism, affected by obscurity and recuperation (thus by non-linearity) and modified by intertextuality (137). Slippages into romanticism as connoted by the emotionally charged trope of �roots� must be acknowledged as forays into (a possibly necessary) essentialism. While we cannot dismiss the very real efforts for the establishment of a literary community by African American women as manifested in the work of The Female Literary Association founded in 1831, we must recognize the matrilineal African-American canon as what it is: an institution created at a specific historical moment, ripe with problems that attend all canons-in-flux and then some (Foster 1966). The academic rediscovery and recognition of black women's writing is certainly indispensable. However, when trying to trace textual influences between African American authors of any gender, this exciting task must be balanced with a material cultural study of what Robert Stepto calls a �family bookshelf� African American tradition, a study of actual print texts that were held, read, memorized and recited from generation to generation (x).

WORKS CITED

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Fraser, Gerald C., �A Scholar Traces �Lost' Literature of Black Women in America.� New York Times. 21 April 1988. Late city final ed.: C23.

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Yellin, Jean Fagan. �Writing Harriet Jacobs: A Life. � The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Hall of Graduate Studies, Yale University. 22 Sept. 2005.