Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, and: Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African Diaspora and Black Goddesses (review)

Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, by Madhu Dubey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African Diaspora and Black Goddesses, by Alexis Brooks de Vita. Westport: Greenwood, 2000.

Either of these books might serve as a response to Richard Wright's devastating evaluation in the 1940s of Zorah Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, his charge that that novel was a "minstrel show," that it was counterrevolutionary, that it represented a parody of black culture and black literature. Hurston might have defended her own work much as Dubey and de Vita defend her as one of the early voices of black feminist literature and affirm the political and artistic relevance and resistance of black women writers from Harriet Jacobs to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayle Jones, among others who publish both in the United States and in Africa.

Both de Vita and Dubey see what the latter calls "the oral folk culture as the source of a uniquely black feminine literary authority" (2), though Dubey states that black women novelists of the '70s and '80s approached folk forms and the black community itself with ambivalence. Nowhere in Toni Morrison's work, Dubey rightly argues, is there an unconditional acceptance of the black community or a "unified collectivity" (49) based at least partly on a view of community as committed "to a reproductive definition of femininity" (59). This also is the very position of that school of black writers and critics Dubey refers to as "the Nationalist Aestheticians," who saw themselves as a vehicle for black nationalism and who ignored or rejected the works of black women writers, at least those who seemed to disagree that a woman's central political role was reproductive. Morrison's Sula, for Dubey, is one of the works that represents a radical new feminism, a rejection of roles endorsed by both black nationalist discourse and by white culture's historical past in slavery. All of Morrison's novels, as Dubey argues, constitute a rejection of black nationalist insistence on the viability of the heterosexual relationship. In the black feminist text, Dubey states, "Relationships between black men and women . . . are driven by violence and sexual perversion" (33) and contribute to "the impossible conditions of black femininity" (39).

An almost universally negative portrayal of black males in the black feminist text is also a contradiction of black nationalist ideology and a rejection of the association of black women with "nature" and biological imperatives. Dubey quotes bell hooks's assertion that black men had bonded with white racist oppressors in a "mutual sexism" (18) in their association of black women with the archetypal matriarch as part of "an essentialist construction of black identity" (29). Concepts of identity are an important consideration for Dubey who sees black women as caught between definitions by white women and black men, when the black feminist writer seeks to define her characters as "an interplay between presence and absence, between wholeness and fracture" (5). Such "fracturing" is relevant to the work of every author Dubey discusses, and her analyses of works by Alice Walker and Gayle Jones are as insightful and challenging to readers as her evaluations and explications of Morrison.

Gayle Jones's Eva's Man is for Dubey a "scathing critique of heterosexuality" (72) and shares with Sula a refusal to accept the black nationalist ideology on the representations of black matriarchy and black families. Jones's Corregidora attempts to discover a sexuality "that exceeds the reproductive definition of black femininity in the discourse of both slavery and black nationalism" (75). Dubey asserts that such unorthodox texts as those by Jones, as well as those by Walker and Morrison, serve to demythologize reproductive ideology and "liberate a new black voice" (86). Along with Alice Walker's realism in depicting the violence...