To come of age as an aspiring Black feminist in the 1980s was, to quote Toni Morrison, “shee     r good fortune.” The urgencies and stakes of the 1980s were exceeded only by the brilliance of Black women scholars of the time whose scholarly interventions at the intersections of feminist studies, African American studies, and Black women writers made possible the present by recalibrating American literary and cultural studies. During this bounty of critical productivity, we were the benefactors of Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, published in 1980; bell hooks’s Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism in 1981; Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave in 1982, Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work in 1983; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose in 1983; bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984; Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches in 1984; Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers in 1985; Mari Evans’s Black Women Writers in 1985; Deborah Gray White’s Arn’t I a Woman in 1985; Cheryl Wall’s Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women in 1989; and bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black in 1989. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, but it is an illuminatingly representative of the archive of Black women’s scholarly productions of the 1980s that shaped the fields of Black feminist thought and African American literary studies.

For me to say hooks’s first two books were especially essential to my work as a Black feminist and a literary historian is significant. Exploring the effects of racism and sexism on Black women by excavating the foundational history of Black women in slavery, hooks’s Ain’t I A Woman provided the critical space to engage Black women writers’ depictions of Black women in slavery. In her first book, she also bravely examined the taboo relationships between Black men and sexism and between White feminists and racism. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was also essential to my understanding of Black feminism, its aims, and its possibilities because of its insistence on intersecting race with feminism.      Not only did hooks seek to make feminist theory more inclusive by centering Black women’s experiences, hooks boldly decentered contemporary white feminist thought, creating more space at the center of critical discourse for African Americans theorists and critics. Before theories of intersectionality and critical race were being discussed in academic spaces, hooks placed the intersections of gender, race, and class at the center of critical discourse, specifically feminist discourse, in both of her books. Identifying the oppressive relationships between systemic racism, systemic sexism, and capitalist patriarchy, hooks prophetically analyzed how these intersections of identity informed the material and social conditions of all women, especially Black women.

With her recent passing, I, like many others, have thought about how she provided me with inspiration, insight, and clarity in my own scholarly work. I’ve reflected, for example, on how hooks and the critical milieu of the 1980s influenced my scholarship in African American literary studies where Black voices, especially Black women’s voices, are centered. Hooks’s profound statement of positionality, for example, in Feminist Theory encapsulates the DuBoisian double consciousness many Black scholars, especially women, experienced: “We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both…. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole” (hooks 1984, ix). Hooks’s insistence on the importance of positionality in Feminist Theory encouraged me to center Black thinkers and Black women writers in my scholarship. My first book, Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1994), intentionally centered the critical voices of African American writers, scholars, theorists, and cultural workers. Many of the essays included were, in those pre-internet days, inaccessible, out of print, or not widely distributed. Making accessible the defining essays from the major periods in African American literary and cultural history enriched both research and teaching. Its publisher, Duke UP, although very different in the ensuing years, did not, in the early 1990s, have an extensive list of books about African American literary and cultural productions. Thus, the anthology’s publication moved a pantheon of critical Black voices from margin to center. Black women theorists were integral to each of the anthology’s seven sections, and one section focused on gender, African American feminist thought, and theory.

My second book, The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction (2002), was a study of gender, memory, and history in contemporary novels about US slavery by Black women in which I posit that remembering is foundational to the afterlives of slavery. Hooks’s insistence on placing Black women at the center of American slavery in Ain’t I a Woman created a foundation for my and other literary studies of Black women in slavery. Examining feminist themes central to hooks’s theorizing, including community in The Freedom to Remember, I analyze the imaginative stories by Black women of enslaved Black women, the women foregrounded in hooks’s historical analysis. In my third book, a co-edited volume, I continued hooks’s project of centering Black women. The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Writing (2009), one of the first in the series devoted to African American literature, is a collection of original essays chronicling the literary history and traditions of Black women writers from the eighteenth century to the present. Organized around the genres and the histories of the tradition, this collection makes legible the intersections of race, class, and gender as well as the role of Black feminisms in the literary productions of Black women.

Hooks once observed that “being oppressed means the absence of choices” (hooks 1984, 5). Born of hooks’s theorizing and praxis, scholarship that advances the possibility of greater choices for and about historically oppressed and marginalized people seems to be, for me, just one of hooks’s enduring legacies.

References

hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.

Morrison, Toni. 1973. Sula. New York: Knopf.