Black Women's Writing Revisited

Works Cited

Alexander, Elizabeth and Marilyn Nelson. Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Alexander, Elizabeth. Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007.

_____. American Sublime: Poems. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2005.

_____. The Black Interior. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2004.

_____. Antebellum Dreambook. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2001.

_____. "The Venus Hottentot." Callaloo. 24.3 (2001): 688-691.

_____. Body of Life. Chicago: Tia Chua Press, 1996.

_____. "Memory, Community, Voice" Callaloo. 17.2 (1994): 408-422.

_____. "Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women's Literature."
University of Pennsylvania, 1992.

_____. The Venus Hottentot. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990; Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2004.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist . New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

DuBois, W.E.B. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Bantam, 1989.

Eversley, Shelly and Jennifer L. Morgan. "Whatcha Gonna Do?" -Revisiting 'Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book'" Women's Studies Quarterly. 35.1/2 (2007): 10-19.

Phillip, Christine. "Interview with Elizabeth Alexander." Callaloo. 19.2, 1996. 492-507.

Walsh, Felicity D. . Review of The Black Interior. Library Journal. 1 Feb 2004. 85

Notes

• 1) Alexander's persona poems include: the title poem of her first collection, The Venus Hottentot, "The Josephine Baker Museum" and "Yolande Speaks" in Body of Life and "Narrative: Ali" in Antebellum Dream Book.
• 2) Alexander's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, the George Kent Award, given by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is an inaugural recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that "contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954."
• 3) In her 1992 dissertation, "Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women's Literature," Alexander argues that black consciousness is best understood as multiple not dual, against Du Bois' axiomatic formulation of black identity as split between irreconcilable strivings.
• 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.
• 5) See Rooks, Noliwe M. "The Beginnings of Black Studies." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 10 Feb. 2006: B8.
• 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.
• 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.
• 8) Jet is a popular African-American publication founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1951 by John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing Company. Jet is notable for its small digest-sized format. It was influential in the early days of the American Civil Rights movement, with its coverage of the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But as Alexander suggests in her narrative the fact that Jet had so many pictures of black people, particularly celebrities, and noted the rare appearance of black people on television documented presence and conferred importance.
• 9) The phrase "lower frequencies" is from the novel Invisible Man. See Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
• 10) The Obamas have had several Jet or black pop culture moments during the campaign, however, including Barack Obama's shoulder brush gesture (Jay Z) and possibly the fist bump they exchanged after he announced that he would be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for the presidency.
• 11) Imagined Community" is a concept established by Benedict Anderson, which states that a nation is a community socially constructed or imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Furthermore, the distribution of publications across distances great and small automatically construct community but they can also be seized upon to deliberately create community through shared images with which readers and viewers identify. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 2006, 6-7.