black women

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

annette — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA). The author, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, does a good job of laying out the socio-political arena in which the members lived, from the importance of stepping to the brown paper bag (skin hue) test to the members’ activism in the public sphere.

Disciplining Women is split into five chapters and includes copious endnotes for the dedicated reader. Whaley introduces us to Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) generally in the first chapter by referencing the recent movie Stomp the Yard and Spike Lee’s School Daze. She notes, however, that neither film is historically complex and both are about men’s organizations, not women’s, which creates kind of a vacancy in popular imagination about the specifics and importance of Black sororities. The first chapter is a stepping point from BGLOs by and large to AKA in particular.

The second chapter focuses on placing AKA and, by extension, other BGLOs into a historical context by connecting the sorority to other culturally significant events: everything from anti-lynching activism at the turn of the last century to1990s AIDS activism and all the way up to the present. Whaley duly notes AKA’s members’ good deeds but also mentions with caution that the sorority’s “politics of respectability and reform ventures” may actually have hurt (and continue to hurt) Black Americans as a whole. One step forward, two steps back, it seems.

The third chapter was the most interesting and informative to me because it covered stepping, something I’ve been interested in since I learned about it in college. (My school had no historically Black sororities or fraternities, but the Black Student Union often hosted groups from other schools, many of which included step performers.) Whaley briefly analyzes stepping by centering it in the step performances of the African diaspora and then centers on how stepping has evolved on college campuses and how young women reproduce and recreate gender, sexual identity, and ethnic loyalties through public ritual. Though other publications have covered stepping more thoroughly, Disciplining Women expands upon Black women’s contributions to discussions of femininity and sexuality.

In the fourth chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, Whaley tackles the minefield that is hazing in a BGLO (or any Greek-letter organization). The primary AKA case study about unofficial pledge activities that resulted in a criminal trial in Kent, Ohio, provided a dark, complicated look into sorority initiation rites.

In the last chapter, AKA sisters and alumnae comment on the future of BGLOs and raise three main points of concern: “class, gender, and racial struggle; regrets and mistakes pertaining to pledging and hazing; and maintaining hope through action in the Black public sphere.” Including the voices of women in AKA proved to be an important point for Whaley; she lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions by setting historical narrative and present-day socio-political and cultural discussion side by side for review.

Disciplining Women does not work well as an introduction to Black Greek-letter organizations and seems more easily approached as a case study of one such organization, Alpha Kappa Alpha, so long as the reader already has some background knowledge of Black fraternities and sororities, stepping, and/or hazing on college campuses. The reading is verbose and intense; more than once I had to reread a sentence to understand what it really meant. Essentially, it’s an academic text rather than a popular history or easy-to-read guide. Any one of the chapters could have been exponentially expanded and, when I was able to follow the author, I often wanted it to; the discussion, when I understood it, was all too brief for my taste. Disciplining Women provides a lot of great information, but make sure you’re prepared to focus and engage in the reading without interruptions or distractions.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, December 5th 2010

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia. The metaphor refers to the time when slaves could be whipped for selling sugar from the plantations for any reason; it embodies both transgression and forbidden pleasure. Tinsley points out that using the term is “stealing language itself” to evoke a “transformative desire” to change the status of women and challenge the injustices of society.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature incorporates black, queer, and feminist theory into its analysis. It draws on literature, history, geography, anthropology, economics, and linguistics to paint a colorful, multilayered portrait of Caribbean women. Texts from Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad (along with occasional references to Cuba, Grenada, Aruba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the region) are used to explore the history of sexuality and the complications of Creole traditions. Tinsley begins with love songs sung by black working-class women to their female lovers, along with accounts of birthday parties and erotic dances and religious ceremonies, as well as messages exchanged in the symbolic language of flowers, to show the intricacies of gender identities in the West Indies.

In succeeding chapters she turns to Luminous Isle, an autobiographical novel by the white Jamaican woman writer Eliot Bliss, then to the erotic poems written in the 1920s by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican Woman, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel, No Telephone to Heaven, and, finally, Dionne Brand’s poetry collection No Language Is Neutral, in order to trace “their poetics of decolonization” and to point out how these texts suggest reconfiguring gender history to acknowledge the strength and beauty of Afro-Caribbean woman-identified women. Tinsley’s brilliant, sensitive explications, her frequent references to artworks from the area, and her descriptions of lush landscapes make reading her work a delight and a surprise.

However, I do wish that she had studied more than one Hispanic writer, Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro Espín. But I understand that bringing in a substantial number of texts in Spanish would have enlarged her project’s boundaries to perhaps unmanageable proportions. Several references to U.S. interventions in Grenada also left me wanting more information on the effects of North American activities in the region. I hope that Tinsley herself or one of her readers will expand on the groundbreaking work she has done in this book. I highly recommend it to a cosmopolitan audience.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 3rd 2010

Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture

tina — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Shayne Lee

Hamilton Books

Shayne Lee, an Associate Professor of Sociology and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University, sets out to make feminism more “chic” and release black women from the shackles of respectability in his latest book Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture. To accomplish these goals, Lee applies a combination of scripting theory and third-wave feminism to numerous women in popular culture whom he sees as models of empowerment, thus diversifying black sexual politics, which he sees as too focused on women’s sexual victimization and objectification.

The introduction presents a clear foundation by providing the reader with background information regarding past and current scholarship in black female sexuality, establishing the methodology for his study, and outlining the overall trajectory for the book. Then, Lee jumps in with a quick rundown of sexuality’s social construction before treating his readers to a succession of eight relatively short chapters, each offering snappy observations of “erotic revolutionaries” from such popular culture arenas as music, sports, comedy, talk shows, and books. A few of these revolutionaries include Beyonce, Serena Williams, Wanda Sykes, Tyra Banks, Karrine Steffans, Mo’Nique, Laila Ali, Zane, and Sheryl Swoopes. Clearly, a strength of Lee’s analysis is the shear variety of women he includes in the study as well as the fact that his focus is not exclusively heterosexual.

However, while I appreciate the breadth of Lee’s scope and number of textual examples, I couldn’t help but want a more nuanced, complex analysis of them. Too often Lee’s discussion of books, songs, videos, images, etc. read more like a review than a careful examination anchored in precise features.

As Lee asserts, such cultural studies are vital contributions to the scholarship of black female sexuality because they are sorely lacking, and a more complex vision of what it means to be an empowered woman who enjoys a healthy and active sex life is needed. For that reason, this book is a notable contribution to the field. Yet, for me, there is a fundamental flaw in Lee’s project. He claims that “flipping the sexual script” ushers in a new discourse of black female sexual expression and in some ways, he’s correct. Women having and talking about sex “like a man” graphically exposes the sexual double standard and denaturalizes conventional gender roles as they relate to sexual practice and expression. This certainly offers women a wider range of roles to play and provides them with venues in which to practice more sexual agency.

That being said, the script seems to essentially remain the same. Sure, the actors performing the script are exchanged, but they are reciting identical lines. So, while “flipping the script” permits black women a greater range of sexual expression and certainly challenges the politics of respectability, I’m left wondering if it’s truly revolutionary. For instance, Lee praises Carmen Bryan’s memoir It’s No Secret because its “vivid descriptions of the physical anatomy and sexual habits of powerful famous men expose how memoirs embolden women with the rare opportunity to objectify men.” This is just one of many such instances where Lee praises men’s objectification. In another example, Lee praises Zane’s novels featuring the secret sorority Alpha Phi Fuckem (APF), whose members treat “men like disposable resources or ‘cum daddies.’”

I, for one, would like to see more representations of female sexuality that don’t walk within the well-established footprints of conventional male sexual expression and don’t rely on using men as a means to an end rather than as equitable partners of pleasure. That said, I’m heartened that the conversation about an empowered and active black female sexual landscape has begin in earnest with Lee’s book, but I am also left wondering: what does an empowered female sexuality look like that doesn’t repeat the vision of sexual agency assigned to men? Give me an expression of female sexuality that is not predicated on acting “like a man” and that would be truly revolutionary.

Written by: Dr. Jennifer A. Smith, November 22nd 2010

Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity Within the Girls Empowerment Project

beth — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Stephanie D. Sears

SUNY Press

Imagining Black Womanhood by Stephanie D. Sears is a sociological account of the experiences of young African-American girls within the Girls Empowerment Project (GEP), an “Afri-centric, womanist, single-sex, after-school program” in Sun Valley, the largest housing development in Bay City, California. Set against the backdrop of a “nation’s collective anxieties” regarding Black women and girls, Imagining Black Womanhood is a well-researched and thoughtful interrogation of race, gender, and class and how the experiences of young Black girls struggling to resist stereotypes within and outside the GEP project speak to broader questions of power, privilege, and politics. Despite the (ironically) unimaginative title, Imagining Black Womanhood is a commendable effort by Sears to question, with equal academic rigor, discourses of empowerment, as well as oppression, in addition to showing how the biases that inform many of the stereotypes that these girls must struggle against come from across the political spectrum and across racial lines.

Sears sets the historical stage well, by tracing images of poor Black women and girls as “welfare queens” to the Reagan administration’s dismantling of the welfare state and its promotion of “trickle-down” economics, with its explicit finger-pointing at the “impoverished African-American female” as an undeserving recipient of benefits. By laying bare the racial and gender stereotypes that underlie these and other predominant images (such as “teen mothers”) of young Black women in the public imagination, Sears demonstrates how discourses from both Black and dominant communities have attempted to control the sexuality of young Black women—and have shaped the context for the growth of projects such as GEP.

Against this background, Sears describes how despite its aim to “empower” and enable Black girls to counter racial and gender stereotypes, GEP inadvertently reproduced many of these discourses in both its structure as an organization as well as its method of work. GEP’s explicit aim, when it initially conducted an assessment of problems such as teen pregnancy and poverty among Black girls, was to “challenge and change…unequal power relations and resource distribution”—that is, the structural issues underpinning Black girls’ social status in Sun Valley. However, despite this goal, GEP’s more pragmatic choice to try and effect change in areas where they could have most impact, meant that they ended up addressing the symptoms of discrimination rather than challenging the structures of power responsible for them. In doing so, GEP fell back on middle class cultural values and notions of “respectability,” attempting to erase what they viewed as the cultural markers of the “ghetto underclass”—such as the hypersexualization and objectification of young Black women—but with them, also the sense of self-hood and lived experiences of the young girls of GEP.

The above is illustrated most interestingly in the section entitled “Dance Lessons,” in which Sears shows how the struggle over sexuality, power, and identity between GEP and the young girls who attend it, is enacted through the “embodied politics” of dance. Prompted by the Afro-centric ideology of GEP, GEP staff’s attempts to encourage the girls to perform African dances (this bearing, in their eyes, the respectable currency of tradition) is countered by the girls’ desire to “express who they are” through contemporary hip-hop numbers. Sears stages the generational and class confrontation between the GEP staff and the girls through their conflicting perceptions of “appropriate” displays of sexuality, respectability, and respect, thereby asking the question that lies at the heart of Imagining Black Womanhood—what does “empowerment” mean, and to whom? How are notions of empowerment intertwined with class and cultural values? And what happens when processes of empowerment attempt to reconstitute the identity of she who is seen to be a “recipient” rather than an equal participant in this process? Sears’ book is a dense but rewarding read, not just for academics but for anyone interested in confronting these questions.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, November 19th 2010

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

mandy — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Jean Smith Young, Faith S. Holsaert, Dorothy M. Zellner, Betty Garman Robinson

University of Illinois Press

Much has been written about the courage and tenacity of the male ministers, activists, and young turks of the Civil Rights movement: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and others. About the role of women, we know less.

Now, six women who were active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) have rectified this omission by compiling their own testimonies and those of their colleagues in Hands on the Freedom Plow. Each of the fifty-two narratives acknowledges the centrality of women’s experience in the struggle for human rights in the southern United States in the late twentieth century. Weighing in at almost 600 pages, these compelling, at times harrowing personal stories recast the history of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of women who lived it day by day.

Formed in 1960 by students—many of them from Black southern colleges—who had participated in lunch counter sit-ins, SNCC was in the forefront of desegregation and voter registration efforts. Theirs was a nearly impossible task, and the dangers they faced daily defy comprehension. Some of the accounts read more like dispatches from Srebrenica or Abu Ghraib than from southwest Georgia and Alabama. As the editors note in their introduction, “We took on the role of dismantling an ingrained system of social and political repression that was then almost a century old, and fought to replace it with a more just and egalitarian society.”

The pursuit of social justice meant the real possibility of mob violence, bodily injury, and the near-constant fear that those threats inspired. Women who chose this work often deferred their education and defied their families. Prathia Hall, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Philadelphia, was a recent college graduate when she joined the movement. She wrote plaintively about her commitment: “We had been warned in orientation sessions not to go into the field unless we were prepared to die.” Hall’s faith was tested in southwest Georgia, one of the most notorious and resistant sites of movement activity. Although she was shot and wounded by sniper fire, she continued her work in the movement. Her assailants were never identified or charged.

One of the book’s co-editors, Judy Richardson—currently a documentary film producer in Cambridge, Massachusetts—left Swarthmore College in the second half of freshman year in 1963 to go south to work for freedom in Cambridge, Maryland, then Atlanta, and later in Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964. Richardson is a tiny, enthusiastic, and determined woman, who, when asked what she most valued about her movement experience, cited “working as a team and consensus decision making,” valuable lessons she continues to use in her work. Only recently has Richardson understood the emotional cost of her activism for her mother, who never acknowledged her own fear or being afraid for her daughter. She did not she ask her to come home—something Richardson considers a gift, a tremendous act of restraint on her mother’s part.

Another Hands on the Freedom Plow co-editor, Dorothy M. (Dottie) Zellner, joined the movement in 1960 after finishing at Queens College. A self-described daughter of Leftists who at seventeen read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for pleasure, Zellner was inspired by the activism of the Greensboro student sit-ins. She went to Miami to challenge segregation in its restaurants, and for her efforts was arrested and placed in a segregated jail. Zellner’s hope is that the stories collected in this volume will inspire others to activism. She notes that just as she grew up hearing stories of people who challenged power and braved the consequences, others may be called to action as well.

These are remarkable true stories from women who at the time were young, old, educated and not, rural and urban, Black, White, and Latina, whose collective actions made a real difference. This autumn through spring 2011, the women of Hands on the Freedom Plow will be making book-related appearances around the country, from Brooklyn, New York to Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Read the full review at Women’s Voices for Change

Written by: Faith Childs, November 14th 2010

Bitch is the New Black

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Helena Andrews

Harper Collins

I don’t believe bitch is the new Black any more than I believe that thirty is the new twenty. As our most recent racial shenanigans have reminded us, Black is still its same ol’ Black self. And anybody who engages in the same shamtastic behaviors at thirty as she did at twenty is just plain trifling. That said, I think y’all should check out Helena Andrews recently published memoir Bitch Is the New Black.

We know good and well that it ain’t easy out here on single Black women. And the Tyler Perryization of Black women’s lives has made it possible for the likes of Steve Harvey and every other jackleg Black relationship expert to capitalize on our story but us. Since Black women are always represented as loud, sassy, and inappropriate, our silence has been deafening. It’s high time that we get bell hooks with it, and start talking back. Helena Andrews has done that masterfully.

Hers is a delicious Black girl story, one that hits so many familiar notes that you are transported episodically to different moments of your own life to recall how you handled a similar situation—family conflicts between your mom, your grandmother and your aunties; your first cheating lover; a pregnancy scare; a ridiculously stressful and uninteresting first job; your first encounter with the domestic abuse of a loved one; your love affair with The Cosby Show. And yet, Helena Andrew’s story is also all her own—unique, self-contained, and filled with the kinds of idiosyncrasies that remind us we are not the same, no matter how many two-dimensional portraits of ourselves we encounter daily.

Here we learn what it is like to be a Black girl reared by a lesbian mother, in a family that associates same-sex love with pedophilia. We encounter a bohemian Black girlhood, one associated with movement, not because of poverty or military life, but because of her mother’s need for new surroundings. For the adult Helena, this translates to a life of literally walking the walk. She doesn’t drive and has no interest in learning, even after two muggings. And when she isn’t walking it out, homegirl Helena is talking it out, in classic Black woman fashion, with an endless string of refreshingly familiar girlfriends and colorful female characters.

The text is, of course, not without its hiccups. But then, neither is the path of a professional Black woman approaching thirty. There are moments when the transition from e-chat speak to text are choppy and disorienting. That’s a technical issue. There is, however, also the sense that while Andrews grew up with a lesbian mother, she wants us to be very clear that she’s as straight as they come, whatever that means. There are, thus, endless recourses to referring to the most mundane of things as being “so gay,” or as in a chapter called "Trannygate," referring to a transchick as “the she-man... name unnecessary.” Uh, not cool.

Andrews certainly didn’t need to get didactic with it, but her own childhood put her in a unique position to represent queer folk humanely and heterosexual dating in ways that might have avoided such strident heterosexism. That said, I know now in a very real way how much courage it takes to let others into your life—particularly among sisters who can sometimes be the worst critics among us—and so I refuse to be overly critical of this book. I don’t promise that you’ll like everything in it. You might even dislike the author, given her self-professed bitch tendencies. But what she has proved is that our stories matter—and if you don’t like hers, write your own.

This is a book for every Black woman who’s ever needed to read, hear, feel, breathe another sista’s story, a book for every girl who’s ever dealt with inappropriate sexual conversations from a mother who’s trying to be hip, an ex-dude with stalker tendencies, or a dead end relationship that kept you pinned down because the sex made your toes curl. And while Andrews has her admittedly bitch moments in this book, she does not shy away from admitting the vulnerability that informs those moments, or from brutal, gut-wrenching honesty in general, even when it means discussing the suicide of a close Black girlfriend in a culture where strongblackwomen just don’t do that.

When I heard about this book last Fall, its title caused me to approach it with the same skepticism with which I approach Tyler Perry movies. I didn’t need to have anyone else calling me a bitch just because I’m educated, especially not a sista. Unlike TP, however, this text does not disappoint. When you read Bitch Is the New Black, you will know that there’s another Black chick out there, who’s slogging through it, who’s working it out, perhaps very differently from you, but who ultimately gets it.

Written by: Crunk Feminist Collective, August 10th 2010

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Tiffany M. Gill

University of Illinois Press

In Beauty Shop Politics, Tiffany M. Gill documents the central role that Black beauticians played in the struggle against Jim Crow laws. Beauty shops were one of the few industries that offered Black women some economic stability and upward mobility in the face of segregation. The industry also offered Black women a respectable alternative to domestic labor, as well as a chance to not work for White people. As political tensions rose, civil rights organizers increasingly turned to Black beauticians for disseminating social and political information.

Initially, White English and French men dominated the hair care industry. Black men slowly worked their way in, serving as hairdressers for White women, but that period was short-lived, as the stereotype of Black men as sexual predators began to emerge. During the antebellum period, Black women began to emerge as hairdressers in greater numbers; the early twentieth century saw the emergence of Black female entrepreneurs, namely Annie Malone and Madame C.J. Walker, who played an integral role in expanding Black beauty culture.

Through hard work and sheer perseverance, the women fought for beauticians to gain the respect of the general public. The women had to fight charges that they were inhibiting racial uplift, particularly because their products appeared to straighten Black women’s hair at a time when it was culturally looked down upon. Still, the women fought to have beautician courses established at Black colleges, arguing that the industry provided Black women economic stability. They also fiercely promoted themselves to the public by contributing to various philanthropic causes.

In times of economic hardship, the beauty industry offered Black women an opportunity to enter a respectable profession that entailed a steady income and entrepreneurial opportunities. On the national level, women worked to create a national organization that would legitimize their profession. In 1912, Madame Walker argued that “hairdresser” was a derogatory term, and insisted on the use of the term “beauty culturist.” With their economic and professional status now in place, beauty culturists were quickly gaining a strong foothold and establishing their place within their communities.

Because the Black beauty industry was owned and supplied by Blacks, and catered to the Black community, Black beauticians had some insulation from the economic hardships that their peers faced. Thus, they were able to participate in civil rights activism without the fear of losing their jobs or their customer base. Some, for instance, established literacy schools so that their students would be able to pass voter registration tests. Others distributed information through their beauty shops, which had become central locations for community organizing. Gill also extends her research to the present day, noting how the focus has now shifted from civil rights to women’s health initiatives.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is its accessibility to a wide audience. Gill writes in a clear and engaging style that makes the book an excellent choice for a non-academic reader who is interested in the subject. She includes noted figures in Black women’s history such as Madame Walker, Annie Malone, and Septima Clark, and uses compelling anecdotes about women such as Mahalia Jackson and Anne Moody, author of Coming of Age in Mississippi. Most importantly, Gill introduces the reader to a roster of lesser-known figures who also played important roles during this period. The book is an invaluable resource for women’s history and African American history scholars.

Written by: Melissa Arjona, July 6th 2010

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

By Maryse Condé

University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 20th 2010

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Catherine Adams, Elizabeth H. Pleck

Oxford University Press

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2010

Off and Running

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Considering the number of children in need of adoption—and the number of children who are actually adopted each year—it's surprising there aren't more adoption stories being told. Aside from The Locator, we've had especially limited access to stories about adopted children reaching out to their birth parents. The delicate, vulnerable position of someone sending a letter out into the world, waiting and hoping to hear back about where they come from, is still a bit of a mystery, and more than worthwhile. In fact, I knew little about it until my own adopted mother finally reached out to her birth parents at age fifty-six.

Not only is that seminal search a matter of discovering identity for the adoptee; it is, potentially, a matter of deep-seated tension between the child and her adoptive parents. My mother actually waited until both of my grandparents had passed before seeking her own answers, to avoid the risk of hurting them.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running provides a candid, thoughtful portrait of such a situation in all its complexities. The documentary follows Avery Klein-Cloud, a charismatic star high school athlete from Brooklyn, who attempts to continue living the life she and her adoptive parents carved out for her while waiting on correspondence from her birth mother. The fact that Avery is trans-racially adopted—the African American daughter to two White Jewish mothers—makes her quest for identity that much more significant.

At the beginning of the film, Avery frankly admits her persistent discomfort in Black social spheres growing up, and later, when a counselor asks, “Do you feel Black?,” Avery says she doesn't know what that means. Her brother Rafi, also adopted but of mixed race, provides an interesting contrast; not only does he seem to have little interest in contacting his birth parents, but he seems entirely unconcerned with his origins. At the very least, he doesn't seem as dependent on where he came from for a sense of self.

Still, Avery's bravery in her search for answers is admirable, and considering how obviously torn she is about her particular situation, she is incredibly forthcoming and self-aware. We get an unexpected amount of access to her private thoughts and feelings about what she's going through, often things that she doesn't even share with her mothers. But as the tension in the Klein-Cloud household escalates, Opper seems to pull back and even gloss over certain pivotal incidents, like a falling out between Avery and her parents that results in her moving out for a period. Opper barely addresses an abortion Avery decides to get when an unwanted pregnancy threatens to impede her track career. In fact, this part of the story is so glossed over that I wasn't entirely sure that it happened.

In the end, Avery's coming of age—and to terms with the fact that she may never meet her birth mother—feels undeserved though still inspiring. Perhaps the fact that Opper has a personal relationship with the family (she was one of Avery's teachers in middle school) can account for her trepidation in handling such sensitive issues. But her reluctance does take away from the moral lesson of the film: that adopted children need to stand by those who've cared for them and showed them support every step of the way, which, in this case, is Avery's unconventional but extraordinary family.

Written by: Caitlin Graham, March 30th 2010

Off and Running

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Off and Running is a very non-traditional coming-of-age story told in a way that deftly conveys one young woman’s unique situation as well as more universal themes. Filmmaker Nicole Opper was afforded intimate access to her subjects, which enabled her to invite the viewer to take a sensitive and warm perspective as the events unfold.

The film’s central subject, a high school track star named Avery Klein-Cloud, is honest and likable. Her story, though specifically about interracial and intercultural adoption, asks questions that many young adults often don’t dare ask aloud. Avery introduces us to her family of white Jewish lesbian mothers and adopted brothers from multi-racial backgrounds during the Jewish festival of Chanukah. At the start of the film, she speaks very matter-of-factly about her decision to attempt to contact her birth mother during her junior year of high school. The significance of this year will be clear to those who have attended school in the U.S.—this is the year that standardized tests and sports results can affect college choices and scholarship options— not a year to be taken lightly. Avery begins to feel the strain, yet perseveres in her quest to find out more about her biological family and reconcile this aspect of her identity with her, at first, seemingly incongruous upbringing.

Along the way, we get to know her adoptive mothers and adopted siblings who all share a similar ‘tell it like it is’ vibe when speaking about serious issues with warmth and humour. Avery meets her old friends from her Jewish elementary school in scenes that further contextualise her upbringing. Filmed chats with another adopted young woman of colour raised by Jewish parents are natural and open—inviting the viewer in and allowing us to experience something we might never have seen otherwise. We also see Avery training for and competing in track meets supported by her long-term boyfriend, and getting to know African American culture with a group of high school friends. She is truly a professional and takes her sport seriously.

What makes this story all the more poignant is that her desire for more contact with her birth mother thwarts her progress in athletics and is detrimental to her relationships within her family. Although there are unexpected developments in this story, Opper maintains a strong, real narrative that shows a complete picture of the desires and feelings on all sides in this family. Opper’s choice to conclude the story the following autumn during the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah is culturally and narratively satisfying.

I found myself empathizing with everyone, which is a testament to the director’s craft. Each of Avery’s brothers shares opinions about her quest, and though one brother is a Princeton freshman and the other is a second-grader, Opper affords them equal screen time in well-framed sequences. Avery’s mothers receive the same fair treatment, and disagreements on screen never feel voyeuristic or melodramatic. There are many television shows aiming for this level of intimacy and family drama. All pale in comparison to Off and Running. Opper has done a great service to this genre, allowing me to reinvest in it as an audience member.

The film looks good as well—kudos to director of photography Jacob Akira Okada and editor Cheree Dillon. Thankfully, there is no voice-over narration, or even excessive exposition: occasional captions show the passage of time. A sympathetic and unobtrusive soundtrack by Daniel Bernard Roumain gives the film even greater depth. Home movie footage and a few still photos provided by this very honest and dignified family round out the story visually.

Feminist? Yes. This is a true story about a young, Jewish, African-American woman who knows her own mind, stands by her decisions, and learns from her mistakes. Unusually, but very successfully, Avery Klein-Cloud co-wrote the film and has actively supported the production process. I’m sure others who see this original documentary will join me in routing for Avery’s and the film’s continued success.

Written by: Chella Quint, February 16th 2010

The Black Body

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

Seven Stories Press

Danquah’s literary libation to the Black body consists of a collaboration of folks—Black, White, and both—all of whom seek to convey what it’s like to live in one, be a part of one, and be affected by one. Before opening The Black Body, I already had preconceived notions of how I thought it would read, considering the fact that I have a Black body, myself. I should have known better. It wasn’t necessarily the topics covered that surprised me, but the way in which they were interpreted and the eloquence with which some of the authors conveyed the subject.

Nzingha Clarke’s passage about hands, her father’s in particular, captured the luxury we, as a generation, have in being able to take our hands for granted. The generations of our parents and grandparents were primarily laborers, and only a few were privileged enough to be able to use their hands to write or teach. Their hands were used to pick, wash, and cook. Ours, however, have inherited the choices most of them never got to make. Clarke’s nonchalance for the appearance of her hands is also a luxury in which our grandmothers and great grandmothers took much care, through the use of lotions and oils, to disguise the obligations of their hands. The hands of Clarke’s father finally got to rest when he was put to rest, and Clarke was able to read the book of his life through his hands.

Another passage that came to be one of my favorites was that of Joel Lipman. I may have been wholly offended with anyone else’s attempts to identify with the Black plight. For some reason, Lipman’s poetic account of his youth through sports was creative, witty, and real. In his essay, Lipman states, “Society and race are a fucked up set of twins,” and in reading his contribution is it no clearer. My reason for taking slight offense is Lipman’s use of the term Black Moses to describe Roosevelt Taylor, and in equating him to an animal in some ways. Perhaps I was offended because I am so used to hearing White people equate Black athletes to machines or animals, and this was simply a flashback. Nevertheless, Lipman seemed to be identifying more than describing, and I appreciated that much.

What I took from Danquah’s The Black Body was a subject that touches, creates, and affects the lives that it contacts.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, January 3rd 2010

Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Stephanie Covington Armstrong

Lawrence Hill Books

When I was growing up, I thought of bulimia and anorexia as "White girl problems." Through the media and interaction with peers, I had been given the impression that Black women did not experience body image issues or struggle with eating disorders. As I got older, I realized that these assumptions were wrong, but I still could not find stories of African American girls or women who had contended with anorexia, bulimia, or compulsive overeating.

In Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat, Armstrong tells her story of growing up poor and hungry in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Norfolk, Virginia. Armstrong's childhood is transient—her mother moves her and her sisters often—and characterized by a constant hunger for food, love, and acceptance. She writes of choosing her childhood friends based on their afternoon snacks and the content of their refrigerators. Armstrong endures foster care and is sexually molested by an uncle when she's a preteen. The emotional pain and sense of betrayal eventually leads her to compulsive overeating and bulimia in isolation. She continues to live out the transience of her childhood by moving back and forth from New York City to Los Angeles while trying to escape herself and her disease.

Armstrong experiences difficulty in finding help with her disorder; she writes of a particular incident in which she is treated like an oddity because of her race. To make matters worse, Armstrong feels the need to keep the secret of her bulimia from her family and friends because she wants to project an image of a strong Black woman to the world, even while going home at night to binge and purge. Thankfully, Armstrong eventually recovers through attendance at twelve step programs and support from her family and friends.

Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat is an important contribution to writings on anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating and body image among women of color. Armstrong presents an example of how a woman can free herself of food addiction and help others by telling her story.

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, November 24th 2009

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Duchess Harris

Palgrave MacMillan

There has to be something said for being able to succeed in concisely communicating the issue of Black feminism and politics, but I think Duchess Harris has done just that. In Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, Harris has touched on so many issues within the arena of Black feminism without scattering both her and the reader’s thought process.

Harris opens with a history of Black American feminism with the organizations of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective She sets the scene with the social, economic, and political climate of the late 1960s. With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the focus on welfare, the Democratic Party would become the welcoming committee for racial liberation. The Republican Party, however, would be seen as the home of racial conservatism.

The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program shifted the social consciousness, thus shifting perceptions of the single Black woman as the typical welfare recipient. With the 1968 presidential election involving Richard Nixon, the opportunity to further capitalize on the concept of the welfare queen took prominence in order to further divide both political parties. In further dividing Democratic and Republican Parties, the continuance of that division spread to the White ethnic and working class groups, whose courtship was heavily sought by Nixon for political coalitions. Adding insult to injury came with the use of the 1965 Moynihan Report in which, Senator Moynihan correlated welfare dependency with the behavior of the “poor” (i.e., Black women).

The Combahee River Collective can be said to have been a direct result of this dominant political theme and its exclusion of Black women in their assertions. Having broken away from the National Black Feminist Organization on issues of sexuality and economic development, the group provided the legitimacy of the need to address the social, economic, and political oppression of Black women. Prominent members of the Collective included, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Margo Okizawa Rey, Demita Frazier, Gloria Akasha Hull, and Sharon Paige Ritchie.

Harris takes us into the artistic address of Black feminism through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, all of which address Black relationships through a patriarchal lens. She also presents Black feminist perspectives from other notable people, such as Lorraine Hansberry, Shirley Chisholm, Anita Hill, and Paula Giddings.

Harris includes appendices that contain questions she asked various women throughout the text, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (Executive Order 1098), and members of this Commission, along with its committees and consultations. Harris does an exceptional task of providing a foundation with which to address the Black feminist perspective in this era, the events which led to this movement, and a critical analysis of a diverse group of scholars and scholarly thought. And, she does this in a competently succinct and unpretentious way.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, November 5th 2009

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:28:00 +0000

By Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Oxford University Press

I Am Your Sister is a collection for those who want and need to be introduced to Audre Lorde’s thinking, and it is a great anthology for those who have read and been inspired by Lorde’s writing all of their lives. How is this possible? Because I Am Your Sister is not just a collection of Lorde’s seminal work, but a celebration, an honoring, and a thoughtful presentation of who Lorde was—a black lesbian feminist activist and writer. The celebration consists of essays that changed the landscape of feminist thinking (such as the selections from Sister Outsider, as well as the full text of A Burst of Light), pieces of nonfiction that have been scarcely published or never before been published, speeches that have never before been seen in print, and a final section consisting of contemporary writers reflecting on the importance and meaning of Lorde’s work in today’s society.

I Am Your Sister is all of the things, and it is so much more. I see it as a revelation of sorts—an eye opener to how the struggles of past times continue to be what we grapple with today. Rudolph Byrd’s informative and phenomenal introduction to the anthology shows us how, “Whether addressing racism, sexism, or homophobia, Lorde was concerned always with complexity and the sense of possibility that the discourse of difference invokes.” This idea of difference, of this challenge to choose, as Lorde says, “to define my difference as you must choose to define yours, to claim it and use it as creative before it is defined for you and used to eradicate any future, any change” is an idea and challenge that is still present in today’s political and activist communities. I Am Your Sister, therefore, is also a tool for survival—a teacher to help us realize our possibilities for change.

Those familiar with Lorde’s work will also appreciate the never before published essays and speeches. While they touch on the themes that permeate all of her texts—difference, survival, sexuality, feminist communities, racism, fighting ignorance—they can be read as wonderful supplements to Lorde’s previously published work, as well as sparks of ideas that continue to inform new readings of texts such as Sister Outsider. In Lorde’s previously unpublished speech delivered at the first retreat of black feminists and activists in 1977, for instance, she states, “our unique position within this system is to constantly question its most cherished assumption and to radically change it, not merely to co-opt it and make it work for us.” These words enrich Lorde’s belief in the essay “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action” that “what is most important...must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the rise of having it bruised or misunderstood.” When these words are read together, we fully understand how embracing and creating different types of language and action are part of who we are as activists, and that this recognition will fuel our ability to challenge, not co-opt, the systems of oppression.

The last section of I Am Your Sister adds even more insight into who Lorde was as a person, who she was as a writer and activist, how these things are not separate from each other, and what Lorde means to us today. Part remembrance, part celebration, and part further interrogation in Lorde’s art, humanity, voice, and passion, the reflective essays from Alice Walker, bell hooks, Johnnetta Besch Cole, Gloria Joseph, as well as the insightful epilogue by Beverly Guy-Sheftall brings the anthology to a satisfying close. But, as is usual with Lorde’s profound prose and ideas, we are always left wanting more.

Written by: Chelsey Clammer, June 14th 2009