Black Women's Writing Revisited

"that dark rich land we wanted to wander through..."

21      While much of this essay has focused on a look at the activist and literary discourse of mothering generated by black feminists in the Northeastern United States, it is important to remember that the black feminists in this region were intentionally in communication not only with black feminists and writers in other regions of the United States but with self-identified black feminist all over the world. The black feminist literary scene was transnational in the late 20th century, but this was not a novelty of the avowed anti-imperialism of black feminists in this era. At the cusp of the previous century, black women writer and publisher Ida B. Wells founded the first international anti-lynching organizations during her travel to England, tracing a path that abolitionist and formerly enslaved woman had traveled before her. Black women from the Caribbean and the United States attended the graduation of Anna Julia Cooper from the Sorbonne in Paris. While researching and writing about these precedents, black feminist literary producers also nurtured a collective movement generated between the differences of their national contexts by reviewing each other's individual books and anthologies periodicals and writing letters of support and subscription to the wide variety of black feminist publications that emerged in the United States, Canada and Great Britain during the late 20th century. The pathologization of black maternity through political rhetoric and social policies in the United Kingdom and Canada led black feminists in these sites to critically engage social production and the language of mothering as well. As we contextualize a movement of black feminist publishing it is important to note the alternative modes of generation that black feminist collectives modeled. Elsewhere I catalog a number of the models to counter the dominant influence of capitalist markets on our historiography of black women's writing. The preponderance of anti-capitalist autonomous literary institutions created and sustained by black women writing in predominantly white national literary markets presents a trajectory through which to reread the contours of black feminist literary practice. My intention in this essay is to point out the queered genealogies of black mothering and to suggest that the figure of the mother in the ignored histories of black feminist anti-capitalist publishing in neocolonialist sites of power such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States could play the role that Michelle Wright suggests this figure plays in the theorization of diaspora. Production becomes visible, as does the violent reproduction of a status quo.

22      A black feminist transnational genealogy for the production of queer sociality and critique clarifies the intersections between reproductive rights, state sponsored narratives of pathology and the queered subjectivities of black women writers within hostile publishing markets and academic institutions. The articulation of queer contexts for mothering enables a theorization of queer intergenerationality, disrupting the oppositional positioning of queer critique and futurity, while maintaining a critique of heteropatriarchal reproduction. Meanwhile a look at the complicity between reproductive coherence and the brief publishing boon of "black women writers" encourages us to look at the dangerous, unmarketable publishing practices that black feminists (many of whom were at the same time working for capitalist publishing institutions) sustained across space and age. While the flows publishing capital sought to reproduce the presence of a few black women writer superstars across the English speaking first world (Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and to a lesser extent Audre Lorde and June Jordan), and to ignore indigenous black feminists movements with specific demands against the state structures of the United Kingdom, Canada and the third world feminist movement in the U.S, attention to the anti-capitalist publishing alternatives that black women nurtured in these sites reveals another geography of articulation and translation. The critique of reproductive futurity that a position centering black motherhood and queer subjectivity requires, illuminates the contours of a body of black feminist literary production that very reproductive force of a market economy as made invisible. But the exclusion of these important text need not be reproduced. Audre Lorde did not simply say "We can mother ourselves." She wrote, "We can learn to mother ourselves." This is one effort to enact that pedagogical process, such that a the reproduction of oppression loses its inevitability, such that the body of work that we call "black women writers" is deepened by our criticism of capitalist market limitations, such that we can present ourselves with alternate futures, and revised histories, and not turn away.