The Sista' Network: African-American Women Faculty Successfully Negotiating the Road to Tenure (review)

In The Sista' Network: African-American Women Faculty Successfully Negotiating the Road to Tenure, Tuesday L. Cooper creates a unique methodological framework that uses the feminist lens of personal experience, Black feminist thought, and semi-fictional and ethnographic theory that weaves the narratives of nine African American women into a roundtable discussion. Cooper's methodology sharply illuminates the various ways the women faculty confront the tenure process at their respective institutions. Within this framework, Cooper skillfully demonstrates the impact that intersecting systems of race, gender, and class have on African American women in the academy and why "The Sista' Network" is crucial. By "Sista' Network," she means the relationships between and among African American women faculty that enable them to assist one another in negotiating the road to tenure.

Cooper first addresses the difficulties African American female faculty face while pursuing tenure, including being both overworked and simultaneously invisible, isolated, and marginalized, with little time and few resources for adequate research. African American women are frequently the only women of color, and on occasion, the only persons of color, in their department. Consequently, African American women faculty often feel coerced by departments to be the on-campus spokespersons for minorities and to serve as advisors to minority students. Added to this is the fact that African American students frequently ask African American women faculty to act as unofficial mentors. The result is an excessive amount of work that reduces the time needed to do research and publication, activities that are essential if one expects to gain tenure.

Second, Cooper explores the tenure process, which manifests a seamy side of written and unwritten rules around teaching, publication, service, and collegiality. When it comes to the issue of academic collegiality, for example, there is an attempt within departments to have African American women decide where they stand in terms of their support and commitment. In other words, "Are African American female professors members of a gender group or members of a minority group?" Pressuring African American female faculty to choose one group over another often results in African American female faculty members feeling disconnected from other faculty members inside the department and inside the institution. Cooper believes there are two reasons why this issue is important. First, there are only a small number of people with whom African American women faculty share a "natural culture-based alliance." Second, in the academic world if one wants support, one must give support. Every choice has its strengths and weaknesses, and from that point on, the faction not chosen may be antagonistic and unwilling to ever provide support. Such circumstances result in African American female faculty members frequently feeling isolated from colleagues within their department and within their institution.

A third section provides an incisive review of the literature, utilizing an array of statistics and highlighting the unique position of tenure-track women and people of color. This third section also focuses on issues of isolation, mentoring, networking, the tenure process, and the various ways Black feminist thought addresses the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality, validating and informing African American women's resistance to these challenges through self-definition and self-validation. Forming the core of the next section of the book is Cooper's explanation of the unique methodological framework she uses to foster a roundtable discussion among the nine women to illustrate the race/gender/class hurdles African American women confront while on the road to tenure.

The uniqueness of Cooper's methodology lies in her use of the "imperfect narrative," a narrative in which Cooper tells "a truthful story in a semi-fictional format." The semi-fictional format is a roundtable discussion among participants that never actually took place and has Cooper serving as interviewer and moderator. In other words, Cooper interviews the participants separately, uses the exact words of the participants and relies on the semi-fictional...