Brief Note on the Historiographyof Women of the African Diaspora | |
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| This covers African American women's history from slavery
to the present. The principal focus of the readings discussions and student
assignments is to apply analytical frameworks of race, gender and class to
understand the life cycles and multiple roles of women of the African diaspora
as mothers, daughters, wives, workers and social change agents. Throughout
the course, we will utilize a variety of monographs as well as primary source
materials to document black women's experiences. The scholarly study of the history of women of the African diaspora in the Americas began in earnest during the heady days of second wave feminism and black nationalism. Certainly, Angela Davis’s seminal “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971), Gerda Lerner’s documentary collection Black Women in White America (1972) and later, the Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terbourg-Penn’s collection of essays The Afro-American Women: Struggles and Images (1978) represent, progressively, the publication of primary materials and the development of analytical frameworks from which the first generation of historians worked. The goal of this first generation of scholars included a political prospect: to present (and represent) African female warriors who struggled against racism and sexism (and/or capitalism) for the benefit of “the black community” or, more intimately, “the black family.” (Note the use of the singular of these fictional constructions of plural institutions.) In the context of a black intellectual agenda to dispel the misogynistic and racist allegations of the 1965 Moynihan Report as well as the social movements that followed, this meritorious, but understandable reaction provided a counterweight to other emerging narratives on the histories of African American [men] and of [white] women. As the title of the first collection of essays in Black Women’s Studies put it, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982). Filomena Steady’s The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (1981) provided a crucial corrective to the field by demonstrating diasporic cultural similarities among women of West Africa, the Caribbean and North America. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, articles and monographs (including many dissertations) documented the lives of African, African American, and African Caribbean women built on these cross-cultural themes. (The bibliography in our textbook More than Chattel is instructive.) The general theme of these studies is the “intersection” of race, sex, and class: to consider how race, how sex/gender, and how class affected the lives and choices of African American women. Scholars tended to analyze how each system of power (or oppression and control) overlapped, but viewed as separate – rather than integrated – phenomena. Simultaneously, work in anthropology and cultural studies inspired scholars in other fields to consider “sex” and “gender” as separate categories. (Curiously, although early black scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, followed by physical anthropologists, had disclaimed “race” as a valid scientific or biological construct in the early 1950s, it took at least three decades for scholars in other fields to examine the social construction of “race.”) |
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The development of social constructionist
theory pushed scholars to consider questions that are more complex and culturally
derived: How do concerns about race shape gender (and sexual) identity? Does
this gendered racial identity differ for middle and working class African
Americans? In examining specific problems, historians are attempting to understand
the difference gender experiences of enslaved women deployed in agricultural
work and those who labored in domestic settings around white women and white
men. Similarly, in law, public policy and political activism, there are questions
regarding the affect of class status on the framing of legal demands for
civil rights – and whether these rights are intrinsically “male.” Central
to the answering these questions, scholars also search the contemporary culture
for suggestions about the worldview of individual women. As these questions
indicate, the intersectionality framework – and the over-stated generalizations
about “black women” that often accompanied it – has become old school. The development of an analytic framework based on social “constructions” – rather than seemingly biologically determined physicalities – also creates a potentially contentious dilemma. Rather than focused studies about women of the African diaspora, more recent works on “race” and “gender” tend to examine men as gendered subjects and whites as racial subjects. The scholarly journal Black Men’s Studies established in 1998 and the emergence of “white studies” seem to indicate that the connections between race, sex, gender, color (and sometimes class and labor) – and perhaps even sexuality? – must be considered to achieve a comprehensive analysis of our collective history. At the same, this work appears to privilege the experiences of white and black men and white women. What does this trend promise for the study of African American women? In the texts assigned for this seminar, we will consider the current state of black women’s history. The selected monographs and essays represent the third wave of scholarly research. Each scholar places African American women at the center of her narrative, yet we may debate whether every book should be classified as “black women’s history.” The objective of this course is to familiarize students with the development and writing of the history of women of the African diaspora. The required texts are examples of the most current historical scholarship in race, gender and class. In addition, through research and writing of three lengthy reviews (of monographs, autobiography and film) students will be introduced to earlier scholarship as well as primary data. By the end of the course, students should be able to
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