Black Women's Writing Revisited

6      Alexander's notion of culture seeks to address blackness as a coexistence of many conflicting, incomplete parts and sources. In "The Genius of Romare Bearden, "which appears in Power and Possibility, she discusses her applications of the term collage.[4]Romare Bearden was a twentieth-century American painter known for his large-scale mixed media collages, particularly portraits composed from the fragments of various materials. Alexander writes, "if African-American intellectual consciousness is split, it is split multiply rather than doubly, and that so-called fragmentation, arisen from the fundamental fragmentation of the Middle Passage, has become a source of our creative power." She continues, "Formal conflict is the locus of true innovation", citing for example, Du Bois' own Souls of Black Folk, which is not a two-part text or a translation between two languages; it is an experimental textual collage, an anthology of essays which effectively "makes the written space" in which he can explore his "collaged identity." Finally, collage enables us to envision a holistic theory of black culture: "Collage, in both the flat medium as well as more abstractly in book form and as a metaphor for the creative process, is a continual cutting, pasting, and quoting of received information, much like jazz music, like the contemporary tradition of rapping … and reclaiming African American history" (Alexander, Power, 35-36).

7      Alexander argues essentially that collage as a concept applied to culture urgently unveils "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." She goes on to term the life behind stereotypes "the black interior." The combination of "collage" and "black interior" complicates what might easily be taken as a simplistic notion of the latter as another way of exoticizing black people as alluring but unknowable. She writes, "The black interior is a metaphysical space […] [of] complex black selves" that is behind stereotype and beyond social convention. This notion of an expansive racial self is not a traditional view" (Black, x). Going back to the cultural debates of the Harlem Renaissance, for wider context on this issue, we know that essays such as "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," by Langston Hughes, "Negro Art Hokum" by George Schuyler and "Characteristics of Negro Expression" by Zora Neale Hurston" engaged the question of whether there was even such a thing as black culture. During the period we think of as a golden movement of African American culture because of the sheer number of publications, performances, and public personalities and the attention they received from international publics, black culture was not an undisputed given and was often viewed as an obstacle to artistry. Hughes's essay in particular argued for the richness of working-class black expression, but he needed to argue his point against what he described as many black artists' tendency to reject "blackness" as a limitation to their expression when he found it to be the sort of liberating field of interiority that Alexander would write about so many years later in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For Alexander, perhaps taking a cue from Hughes, social identity is not seen as "a constraint but rather as a way of imagining the racial self unfettered, racialized but not delimited. What I am calling dreamspace is to my mind the great hopeful space of African American creativity" (ibid 5). Just by assigning black consciousness to the realm of the interior or the dreamspace, the psychic level of humanity, Alexander enables us to envision how social forces register upon subjectivity, upon a person, upon a community and how they refashion all of this for their own means.

8      Alexander's notion of racialized psychic space should not be confused with abstractions of racial identity. During the 1980s and 1990s, black women writers' work was toxically linked with deconstructionist theories that did less harm to Whiteness, which continues to determine cultural norms, and more harm to the expressive cultures women and people of color. At stake is not only the theoretical textual space for black women intellectuals. As significant are the hard won physical locations, such as offices and positions of authority on college campuses and other manifestations of our literal roles in the university and other spheres of intellectual life, which appear to be alarmingly expendable and misunderstood.[5]See Rooks, Noliwe M. "The Beginnings of Black Studies." <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education</em>. 10 Feb. 2006: B8. As academia genuinely moved to make space for the writings of women and people of color, Alexander writes:

[It] birthed a tricky trend: to so theorize and construct and deconstruct identity 'categories' that some were apt to forget women and people of color themselves, in bodies, who wrote things that we urgently needed to read and who remained grossly under-represented among the professoriate, women and people of color whose voices and actions in historical, political and cultural life were too often marginalized, trivialized, forgotten, or erased. As "race" became a "category" […] the focus was lost on actual people of color […] (Power 202).

In other words, theorizing race served as a new way of universalizing and obscuring the specificities of black experience. Race became a category between quotation marks as well as a euphemism for racism that was disengaged from its historical determinants and the people that embodied it, partly as a result of cultural shifts away from clearly defined racial lines. Alexander's concept of a racialized dream space reconstructs the notion of race around interiority and physicality, which would seem to be contradictory. However, for Alexander embracing racial identity releases the individual from what she calls the shorthand of sociological and fantasy discourses and into the freedom to know and be known by their real culture in all its horror and glory.

9      Turning to examples from Alexander's prose, we locate the ways in which she negotiates the conflicting but, in her view, not irreconcilable imperatives toward psychic dream space and racial identity. Alexander draws upon crucial scholarship in which writers modeled forms of flexible thought and textual multiplicity. Her influences include intellectuals who have made use of fragmentation in their works, such as Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, The Black Book, which is a cultural scrapbook edited by Middleton A. Harris, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's concept of heteroglossia in literature, Alice Walker's use of the epistolary form in The Color Purple, Faith Ringgold's quilts and, of course, Bearden's collages. Through these examples we can understand how her concepts of collage and interiority work together to make possible expressions of self that are fragmented without being incoherent, both racialized and dreamlike. However, the greatest direct influences on Alexander are fellow scholars such as Henderson, lawyer and professor of law Patricia Williams and literary theorist Hortense Spillers who prioritize the capacity of texts to speak in tongues or themselves write in multiple genres. And they do so with particular urgency grounded in their historical position as black women. Alexander quotes from Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor: "I am trying to create a genre of legal writing to fill the gaps of traditional legal scholarship. […] To this end I exploit all sorts of literary devices, including parody, parable and poetry" (qtd. in Black 104). Williams sought to address what Spillers has described as the ways in which

[t]he language of the historian was not telling me what I needed to know. Which is, what is it like in the interstitial spaces where you fall between everyone who has a name, a category, a sponsor, an agenda, spokespersons, people looking out for them-but you don't have anybody. That's your situation. (Eversley and Morgan 308).

10      Alexander may not write with exactly the same intergeneric textual strategies as Williams or address the precise issues of historiography Spillers describes but she does write within a conceptual framework that to a large extent builds upon these scholars' ideas and agendas. Alexander's bibliography illustrates an aspect of what Hazel Carby calls an "intertextual coherence"or a shared discourse among black women writers that is thoughtful and deliberate as they draw upon each other's work in order to address shared concerns (160-169). Thus when, in her essay on Cooper, Alexander describes the author's intergeneric textual strategy, which I refer to as "speaking in tongues," in which "the essays are at once allegory, autobiography, history, oratory, poetry, and literary criticism" we can observe her marking the historical precedent for Williams' intergeneric forms and her own work in diverse genres such as poetry, prose, and drama.[6]Alexander's play, "Diva Studies," was produced at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996, and she was a dramaturge for Anna Deavere Smith's play "Twilight" in its original production at the Mark Taper Forum. Alexander goes on to assert, "only such a diverse structure could encompass the tensions of forging an African American, female, demonstrably thinking self from whatever intellectual material was at hand" which demonstrates to us the urgency with which Alexander views formal innovations in writing among black women (101).