Black Women's Writing Revisited

6      For this reason it is crucial for me to distinguish between the much examined topic of "black women's writing" between in 1970 and 1990 and the black feminist literary production during the same period which will be my focus in this article. Black feminist literary production was not necessarily a distinct movement from the black women's literary renaissance of the time period, because its practitioners were deeply involved in this renaissance, but rather than tracing the development of a black women's literary tradition, this project seeks to reveal and participate in a rival temporality, a queer intergenerational focus on words that were not meant to survive. This article theorizes poetry as a productive act, examines the ways in which the poetics through which black feminists responded to and transformed the publishing possibilities of the time period, and proposes a shared refocusing of the impact of black women's literary work in the late 20th century. What I am calling black feminist literary production has a queer relationship to "black women's writing" such that the former exceeds and critiques the coherence of the later. The "queer" in this project, by denaturalizing and illuminating social reproduction, allows an examination of the politics and possibilities of production subsumed in racialized narrative of capitalism. In this instance queer outsidership and the place of the invisibly laboring, criminalized black mother merge. This queer relationship manifests in what I am calling a poetics of black queer maternity.

7      The black feminist literary practitioners that inspire this project were at once included in, excluded from and amputated by black cultural nationalist and white feminist movements because their deviant sexual positionality was not useful for a black nation or a multi-cultural liberal sisterhood, because of their inability or refusal to reproduce properly. Because of their inability or refusal to reproduce property, these black feminist literary engaged in a critical revision of family, a radical anti-imperialism and a socialist experimentalism. As Cathy Cohen has argued, the position of the pathologized black mother must be seen as a queer postionality.(Cohen 1997) I want to add that this position, in critical tension with capitalist ideas of family, is also a position out of time with the clock of development that uses the same progress narrative deploy welfare reform domestically and structural adjustment policies internationally. For all of these reasons these black feminist literary producers inhabited the queer threat of the pathologized black mother. She who refuses to reproduce the status quo threatens to produce a radically different world. The black feminist literary figures that led and epitomized this practice were lesbian and bisexual radicals such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan who are now historicized as queer ancestors.[4]See, for example, the Audre Lorde Project, a center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit people of color organizing in New York City (www.alp.org) or Zami an organization of "lesbians of African descent" in Atlanta or National Black Justice Coalition (an organization committed to the legal rights of black non-heterosexual people) feature of June Jordan on Day 1 of their black history campaign. Cherrie Moraga, for example, recently proclaimed that black lesbian feminists such as Lorde, Pat Parker and June Jordan, gave lesbians like her, "a body, a queer body in the original dangerous, unambivalent sense of the word, a dyke body that could not be domesticized by middle class American aspirations."[5]Cherrie Moraga at "Sister Comrade" a celebration of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker at the First Congregational Church in Oakland, California on November 3rd. 2007. I am proposing that the invocation of black maternity as an alternative to genocide in the period between 1970-1990 required the production of a queer time and space within which black women and young people could operate as co-producers in a future radically different from their present.[6]See Judith Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005. And Jose Munoz "Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism" (forthcoming).

An Approach

8      It may remain unclear to some readers why "mothering" of all things holds the queer transformative potential in my analysis. Does not the term mother retain an inescapable essentialism? Is it even possible to delink motherhood and the reproduction of racial difference? Michelle Wright's Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora provides a helpful critical precedent for the work of understanding mothering as the marker of a queer discursive strategy in black feminist publishing in the late 20th century. Wright argues that the figure of the black mother, as deployed by poets such as Carolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde, interrupts the production of blackness in opposition to whiteness. Wright explains that whereas the masculinist knowledge production that has passed responsibility for the production of an ontology of blackness from man to man to man over time in a dialectical struggle with the white patriarchal knowledge project that seeks to reproduce white humanity through black abjection, the figure of the mother allows for a dialogic paradigm shift. The figure of the mother calls reproduction into question, reminding us that the production of racialized subjectivity occurs across difference, in dialog, not passing from one to one, but rather created as the tense reconstitution of race despite the dynamic coupling of different, but not opposite bodies. So while the erasure or subsumption of the subjectivity of mothers under the authority of patriarchy has facilitated essentialist reproductions of racialized dehumanization, the rival authority of the black mother has the potential to reveal racial difference as a social narrative, the terms of which are contingent and do not have to be reproduced.

9      To be sure, the use of motherhood in black women's literature is not necessarily queer. The most cited uses of narratives of motherhood in black women's literary criticism and literature in the late 20th century sought to argue against the pathologization of the black family, through representations of motherhood that were in conversation with cultural nationalists towards the reproduction of a black race. In this paper I seek to distinguish between representations of black motherhood and black feminist revisions of the significance of mothering. The latter, I will argue, uses the pathologization of black maternity to create a queer revision, revealing the socially produced predicaments of black mothers and offering rival structures of nurturing and futurity. In order to make this distinction as clear as possible I will take some space here to clarify my uses of the terms "queer," "black" and "maternity" in this statement.

Queer

10      I use queer not as an identity marker, but rather in the way that Roderick Ferguson interprets Barbara Smith's use of the term "lesbian" in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." (1977)[7]Roderick Ferguson. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 127. In that text, written during a period in which Barbara Smith was communicating with Lorde as a participant in the Combahee River Collective retreats and June Jordan as the moderator of the on the Feminism and Black Women's Writing Panel at Howard University, Barbara Smith defined lesbian as what Ferguson calls a "negation," as anything that fundamentally challenged heteronormativity. Therefore, Ferguson argues, lesbian was not an identifier but rather an alarm, pointing to the violence of existing identity frameworks and calling for a critical difference. I align with Ferguson's assertion that one genealogy for the contemporary use of term "queer" in queer theory is Smith's non-identarian use of "lesbian."