Black Women's Writing Revisited

11      What makes Alexander's engagement of Cooper so persuasive is her critical approach. As a black feminist scholar, Alexander tends to avoid the family metaphors that abound in black feminist writing and yet she writes about the writers whose works are important to her with close, intimate attention to their craft. Her essay on Cooper is not only a praise song in a single-minded form of sisterhood; rather Alexander's essays on black women writers demonstrate the ways in which one can have a critical relationship to a writer-forbearer such as Cooper. Used as a critical device the term I and I means that as Alexander critiques her subjects, she voices them. And in so doing she makes and marks her own emergence as a writer, clearing tracks for her to write herself into textual expression, which is to say, into intellectual existence. But there is nothing "natural" about this process of critical engagement between black women writers. Alexander writes that "the great utility of so much black feminist theory was the guiding truism that black women have blazed alternative routes to making sense of the world, that regardless of our differing circumstances, we have had to look from the outside to make sense of a world that has not endeavored to include us among its intellectuals" (Power 3). These "alternative routes" required alternative written expressions and intergeneric textual strategies are formal innovations in black women's prose.

12      In "Anna Julia Cooper: Turn-of-the-Century 'Aframerican' Intellectual" Alexander does a close structural analysis of Cooper's use of the first-person voice in A Voice from the South, Written by a Black Woman. Literary historian Mary Helen Washington called A Voice "the most precise, forceful, well-argued statement of black feminist thought to come out of the nineteenth century" (qtd. in Black 99). This essay, first drafted for Alexander's dissertation, represents fundamental principles for her current theories of culture that are necessary to explore. As the essay is about the best-known writing of the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D., which she did at the age of sixty-seven, it is certainly celebratory.[7]Cooper earned her degree at the Université de Paris, Sorbonne for her thesis, written in French, on attitudes toward slavery in France between 1789 and 1848.Alexander does not, however, withhold criticisms of Cooper's essentialism about both men and women as well as the sense of superiority that at times seems to underlie her sense of duty toward the masses of African Americans (Black 106; 109). The essay's understructure, however, consists in Alexander's own search for writing models, written as it was while she was studying for her Ph.D. It shows the elements in Cooper's work that Alexander found most important: Cooper's intergeneric textual strategy and her expansion of the concept of "I" to include "us."

13      In Alexander's view, Cooper grounds her philosophy in the specificities of her own life with well-chosen autobiographical elements, such as her region and parentage. In turn these details of her life as the daughter of a slave, an educator, a mother and so on, clarify what I understand to be the vagueness of the unspecified "a voice" and the broad reference to " black woman" in the title of Cooper's book. The book is not published anonymously and its authorship is known. However, by using the terms "a voice" and "black woman" in the title Cooper leaves room for a shared black woman's perspective and indicates that she understood her self-expression to be a collective and representative one. Alexander points out that one of the ways in which Cooper constructs this relationship is to reconstruct or ignore the limitations of time. For example, according to Alexander, Cooper writes that she "was born during the civil war years, "which began in 1860, when she was born in 1858 before the war. Alexander figures this misstatement as a "blueprint for the ideas of self-situation" that Cooper uses in A Voice to "place herself squarely within the slave community" as a "prophet" and one with "privileged status" (Black 105-106). Alexander goes on to say that Cooper's association with the Civil War "illustrates the war Cooper will fight in A Voice between intuition and 'book learning'" (Black 106). We will see in Alexander's essay Jet that she addresses a similar tension between something like visceral connections to black identity and responsibility toward social integration.

14      Although for lack of space I cannot rehearse Alexander's thorough and detailed analysis of Cooper in its entirety here, I want to emphasize the ways in whichthe nineteenth-century scholar's influence is in terms of writing forms, rather than only or primarily an emotional sense of sisterhood. There were a number of early black women writers who might have offered Alexander writing models, including Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Ida B. Wells. However it was Cooper's "sense of racial collectivity and duty" coupled with her formal innovations in the collective I, which Alexander felt would best "open up the way [she] saw [herself] and record that which is unreconciled and perhaps unreconcilable inside [I and I]" (Black 104). My insertions replace the pronouns "we," "ourselves," and "us," respectively and respectfully. I made this move in order to try to illustrate the ways in which Alexander's claims on Cooper are both personal and collective, on behalf of her own imagined audience of women readers who would share her search for writing models whose work would help them to think about their own creativity as Cooper did for her. Alexander is particularly taken with Cooper's first-person voice. She writes:

Cooper's strategic use of the first-person 'I' reveals the ways in which she allows her own experience-her own existence, even-to inform the rhetoric of her text as evidence for the feminist strategy she advocates. By metaphorically writing her body into the book, Cooper forges textual space for the creation of the turn-of-the-century African American female intellectual (Black 101).

The ways in which Cooper reaches out to her audiences as witnesses,not just distant readers, through the life experiences she narrates and the issues facing black women that she represents become clearer through Alexander's analysis. By expressing "I" she logically addresses "you." Alexander quotes Valerie Smith who writes, that autobiography is "process, rather than genre;" and adds that it is "a mode of thinking and therefore a theory of reading as well" (qtd. in ibid. 112). When the writer talks about herself, the reader rises out of his or her own abstraction or objectivity in order to make a more direct and immediate connection with the writer and her ideas. She reads autobiographically, in other words. In this essay about scholarship and subjectivity, Alexander certainly wrote about her own relationship to Cooper. She gives us a glimpse into why and how she read Cooper at a moment "marked historically by Anita Hill's treatment during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing" (ibid. 102). Far from a confessional, Alexander writes the beginnings of her own intellectual biography, asking, "How would I 'write theory' in a voice that was truly mine? Why, in academic exercises, did I frequently feel that so much of my knowing was inaccessible to me? Yet why did I also not feel comfortable writing in the 'womanist' mode of Alice Walker" (Alexander, Black 103)? Alexander selects Cooper rather than her contemporaries and she eventually describes her affinity with the legal scholar Williams rather than the black woman writer of her day, Walker. For Alexander, Williams and Cooperwere writers who shared some of the specific details of autobiography and intellectual history that she wanted to resolve as a prose writer and scholar.

15      There are many more ways that Cooper has influenced Alexander - use of wit and sarcasm, writing about the body, using corporeal, physical metaphors, the tension between intuition and book-learning, modulating the authority that comes with status as a Ph.D. and a educator, negotiating racial collectivity with individual needs for expression-than I can address here. However, in my view, the aspect of Cooper that shaped Alexander the most is the integration of the writing self with the reader and the way that Cooper used language, not just as a vehicle to carry ideas, but as tools to expand existing rhetorical barriers to the level of expression that she felt was most urgent in her day. Due to Cooper's use of autobiographical details in A Voice, Alexander points out that the text "becomes a symbolic representation of the body of the African American woman of letters" (Black 101). The autobiographical process between reader and writer, Cooper and Alexander, and Cooper and I through Alexander's analysis, makes A Voice an emphatic statement of and agent ofa collective body of African American women of letters.Such a writing and reading community acts like a balm amidst the usual stereotypes naturally, but particularly when confronting the isolation that comes with her position as only the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D. In writing A Voice, Cooper created a place for herself as a writer in English, in the U.S. within her own communities and ours today.