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New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 27, 2008
I was a research assistant for this book!
November 20, 2017
Barbara Christian is a genius and her work should be considered up there as canon
January 28, 2019
So many typos! Commas seemingly thrown in randomly, "by" instead of "my," "thier" and other misspellings...yeesh. Not to mention Clotel is misspelled twice and the Moynihan Report is identified as being from 1966 (no) and the '50s (also no).
But, there are some compelling points made about Black women writers, and I appreciated Christian's intro to each piece, because she comments on her feelings about the essays, revisions she made, and more about her process.
But, there are some compelling points made about Black women writers, and I appreciated Christian's intro to each piece, because she comments on her feelings about the essays, revisions she made, and more about her process.
January 19, 2008
Imagine. You are Barbara Christian. It’s the mid-1970’s and you’re trying to write a dissertation on black women writers, yet there is only one book-length study of black women’s history for which you can use to place these writers in a historical context. When you seek to publish your first book on black women writers, you receive rejection letter after rejection letter before Greenwood Press accepts the manuscript and publishes Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980), the first book-length study on the African American female literary tradition.
Barbara Christian is one of the founding mothers of contemporary African American feminist literary criticism. When she published Black Women Novelists in 1980, she was not only publishing the first book of its’ kind, but she was ensuring that the authors and books she was writing about would not be lost due to lack of attention. Throughout these essays, Christian talks about a time when African American women’s history and literature were inaccessible and left out of the canon. As a college student of the mid-1990’s, who even had the privilege of taking an entire advanced undergraduate seminar on Toni Morrison, it’s hard for me to imagine a time when contemporary books by black female authors were so inaccessible. Readers of New Black Feminist Criticism will learn that it was only through the activism of early black women’s historians and black feminist literary critics, like Barbara Christian, that so much of this work entered and endures in the academy.
In the 1980’s, Barbara Christian became known for her criticisms of theory. When the humanities got turned on by theory, Barbara Christian made public her opinion in her controversial essay “The Race for Theory” (1987) in which she warned that the theory trend had the potential to undo the activist work she and others had done to make literary criticism accessible to broad, non-academic audiences. Many scholars thought of this essay as anti-theory, but for Christian, it was not anti-theory, only anti-inaccessibility. Christian challenged the jargon-y language of theory, “I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the ‘critical scene’” (44). Further, she added, “as a student of literature, I am appalled by the sheer ugliness of the language, its lack of clarity, its unnecessarily complicated sentence constructions, its lack of pleasureableness, its alienating quality” (44). Barbara Christian knew that black literature was not only being talked about in academic settings, but that black literature was often the topic of conversation at beauty parlors, in private reading groups, in churches, and other non-academic settings. For her, black literature was important to ordinary black people, including herself. For Christian, the books within which she immersed her life’s work were not merely writing that should be deconstructed and embedded in academic jargon, but that it was writing that could be “life-sustaining” and “life-saving” for so many, especially when decoded by critics, like herself, who depended on an analysis that was rooted in African American history and experience.
Barbara Christian became interested in black women’s writing at a time when it was being studied by less than a handful of people, but here in 2008, it’s hard for us to imagine a time when authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker might not have or did not receive the attention they should have. It is literary critics like Barbara Christian that we owe for giving us insight into a literature that helps sustains so many of us.
Barbara Christian is one of the founding mothers of contemporary African American feminist literary criticism. When she published Black Women Novelists in 1980, she was not only publishing the first book of its’ kind, but she was ensuring that the authors and books she was writing about would not be lost due to lack of attention. Throughout these essays, Christian talks about a time when African American women’s history and literature were inaccessible and left out of the canon. As a college student of the mid-1990’s, who even had the privilege of taking an entire advanced undergraduate seminar on Toni Morrison, it’s hard for me to imagine a time when contemporary books by black female authors were so inaccessible. Readers of New Black Feminist Criticism will learn that it was only through the activism of early black women’s historians and black feminist literary critics, like Barbara Christian, that so much of this work entered and endures in the academy.
In the 1980’s, Barbara Christian became known for her criticisms of theory. When the humanities got turned on by theory, Barbara Christian made public her opinion in her controversial essay “The Race for Theory” (1987) in which she warned that the theory trend had the potential to undo the activist work she and others had done to make literary criticism accessible to broad, non-academic audiences. Many scholars thought of this essay as anti-theory, but for Christian, it was not anti-theory, only anti-inaccessibility. Christian challenged the jargon-y language of theory, “I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the ‘critical scene’” (44). Further, she added, “as a student of literature, I am appalled by the sheer ugliness of the language, its lack of clarity, its unnecessarily complicated sentence constructions, its lack of pleasureableness, its alienating quality” (44). Barbara Christian knew that black literature was not only being talked about in academic settings, but that black literature was often the topic of conversation at beauty parlors, in private reading groups, in churches, and other non-academic settings. For her, black literature was important to ordinary black people, including herself. For Christian, the books within which she immersed her life’s work were not merely writing that should be deconstructed and embedded in academic jargon, but that it was writing that could be “life-sustaining” and “life-saving” for so many, especially when decoded by critics, like herself, who depended on an analysis that was rooted in African American history and experience.
Barbara Christian became interested in black women’s writing at a time when it was being studied by less than a handful of people, but here in 2008, it’s hard for us to imagine a time when authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker might not have or did not receive the attention they should have. It is literary critics like Barbara Christian that we owe for giving us insight into a literature that helps sustains so many of us.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews