Browsing by Subject "Black feminism"

In this dissertation, I analyze the critical, creative, and personal work of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Alice Walker in order to suggest that spirituality can be a useful component of Black feminist self-repair. Within the scope of Black women’s literary history, I argue that Morrison, Spillers, and Walker each functioned as three figures from Afrodiasporic spiritual traditions: the griot, the conjurer, and the medium, respectively. This project contends that there is significant overlap between spirituality and magic, the latter of which is defined as the use of ritual activities or observances which are intended to influence the course of events or to manipulate the natural world. In the context of this project, I interpret “magic” as a collection of stylistic choices, inherited traditions, and behaviors that enable Black Americans to repair the psychic, physical, and emotional damage that has been internalized in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow segregation. This practice of self-repair through magic draws on ritual activities and observances that exist within both Afrodiasporic spiritual traditions as well as a body of Black feminist literary knowledge that has been passed down through generations of Black women writers. I contend that Black Americans’ ability to perform self-repair through spirituality is a practice of world-making that is rooted in Black feminist thought.

"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.