Black Women's Writing and Narrative Theorization

I was struck by the continued relevance and immediacy of Deborah McDowell’s work in The Changing Same. Of course, there is certainly more black women’s literary criticism today than in the 1980s but many of her arguments remain significant, and it seems to me, have helped give form to literary critics and theorists like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman. In The Changing Same McDowell refuses to offer a teleological engagement with black women writers and critics but instead uses a critical methodology to “chart intellectual influence.” Mcdowell’s argument for the need of interdisciplinary methods that deconstruct as they construct lineages seems reminiscent of Lisa Lowe’s ideas about “disciplining.” She argues that black feminist criticism is more than academic, by its nature.

I am also interested in McDowell’s citation practice. Some black feminist literary scholars--like Cheryl Wall, Hazel Carby, and Hortense Spillers-- are still actively cited. Others-including the foundational Barbara Smith--seem less consciously brought into the discussions of black women literary critics. I am also interested in McDowell’s use of the personal in her essays, something seen as important to scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Nicole Fleetwood--but under-recognized in the work of  McDowell. 

In particular, McDowell’s chapter “Witnessing Slavery” would not be out of place if published in 2020. Here she does not so much focus on the slave narrative--but instead the slave narrative novel--a novel form primarily written by black women because of the relative lack of enslaved female literary voices. I do wish she did engage with alternative modes of reading/knowledge and engagement when discussing the work of enslaved Black Women (I am thinking here of Harryette Mullen’s argument for spiritual forms of creation as precursors to Black Women’s literature).  Mcdowell argues that black women are at the forefront of the reinvention of slavery, using literary conversations to intervene against historians like Eugene Genovese who present masculinist depictions of slavery, as well as a focus on “agency” at the expense of other theorizations.  In depicting the differences found in black women’s slave narrative novels, Mcdowell writes that “sexual victimization does not focus on the body or silenced victim.”  This argument is mirrored by many scholars, especially in discussions of scenes from the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Black women’s writing, for McDowell, at once reinvents the slave narrative, makes historiographical interventions, refutes conventions of form, removes the body as a site of victimhood, and reconstructs undisciplinary methods. McDowell’s analysis of Dessa Rose also remains significant because of her assessment of the novel's self-conscious engagement with the critical discourse, challenging binary ideas about form.

Jumping off of McDowell’s intervention about witnessing slavery, I am interested in black women’s literary depictions of slavery--thinking specifically of Beloved, but also Dessa Rose and Corregidora. After reading Stephen Best’s None Like Us,  I have been thinking about the uses of Beloved in particular. It is at once claimed as a transformative piece of literature and also transformative for literary criticism, for history, and for political theorists writing about slavery. Though these other novels were not held up as exemplars in multiple fields like Beloved has been, I have been thinking about the ways in which black women’s fiction about slavery premeditated the current critical moment which is so focused on slavery, death, and mourning. A corrective to the absence or lack in the body of slave narratives (according to McDowell), these novels cannot just be novels. This isn’t an argument to depoliticize the work of black women writers or that these interpretations of slave narrative novels are incorrect, but to think about the  spaces between them elucidated by Stephen Best.  The spaces in the archive between redemption and absence. 

I was also struck by the relationship between mothers and their children, most prominently in The Women of Brewster Place. The emphasis on loving babies versus raising children, Mattie’s loss of her house to her son’s crimes and the depictions of children at Brewster Place. Mother-child relationships are also central to many of the slave narrative novels analyzed by McDowell, in particular Dessa Rose and Beloved. I am interested 

In some ways it seems that the arguments made by prominent black literary critics working now--that of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman in particular--are rehearsing versions of arguments made by Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall while using vastly different formal innovations in their own work. I am as intrigued by this formal transition in Black Women’s Literary criticism as I am in the development of literature. How did the impetus to write theory supplant more traditional works of criticism? Was this a result of the emphasis on high theory in the 90s, which often excluded the work of African American writers and theorists? Or is it part of its own distinct lineage of theorizations? In Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley writes about theorizing through narrative as part of a black feminist intellectual tradition. In what ways are both novelists and scholars of black women’s literature theorizing through narrative? These are some of the questions I am thinking about while reading.