Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings (review)

The recent debates over the film Precious (2009), based on Sapphire’s novel PUSH (1996), highlight the fact that the representation of black female sexuality is still intrinsically taboo. Opponents of the film criticize it as yet another example in a long history of misrepresentations of black life mired in sexual deviancy that is presented as inherent to black culture. Historically, the denigration of black people as a whole, and black women in particular, as subjects whose status is overdetermined by scripts of hypersexuality and violence makes it difficult for authors and critics to represent a liberatory black female sexuality. Somewhere between black authors’ historical approaches to black female sexuality in terms of a politics of respectability and celebratory studies that disregard the historical baggage that accompanies black female performances of sexuality lies a potentially productive field of inquiry. In her timely and inventive text, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings, Donna Aza Weir-Soley captures one of the most challenging concerns of scholars who engage black women’s literature, culture, and theory: the ongoing quest to locate a form of black female sexual agency that neither withers in the chilly lake of sexual repression nor explodes in the heat of hypersexual stereotypes. Weir-Soley provides an intervention that argues for the interdependency of the sexual and the spiritual in the full actualization of black female subjectivity, a position that offers representations of black women as “both moral and sexual beings” (xiv).

From the outset, Weir-Soley positions her project in the context of the ongoing debate surrounding black female sexual representation in popular cultural expressions such as hip-hop music videos, dancehall music, and film. Her preface engages the range of critical responses that, she argues, are incomplete in their characterization of black women as either “fully appropriated victims of patriarchal sexism or fully empowered subjects confidently challenging bourgeois respectability” (xiii). Arguing that black women have long sought to resist “the devaluation of their identities since their arrival on the New World stage” (xiv), she charts the literary trajectory of black women’s self-representations as both moral and sexual subjects. She performs this complex task by reading several Africana women’s texts in terms of an African-based epistemology that integrates the secular (sexuality) and sacred (spirituality), which she claims are mutually exclusive, binaristic, and even antagonistic discourses in the Judeo-Christian framework. Such discourses are rendered only partly legible when considered singly, and are incompatible when considered jointly through a primarily western, Judeo-Christian lens.

Weir-Soley makes explicit the African-based spiritual resonances that provide an incisive framing and interpretation of sexuality and spirituality as redemptive aspects of a balanced, healthy subjectivity. Such a framing lends new insight to interpreting the spiritual and secular narratives that cohere within each of the texts she analyzes. Providing, first, the historical and literary contexts in which spurious allegations regarding black women’s sexuality circulated and against which they operated in the Victorian era, Weir-Soley reevaluates Harlem Renaissance-era writers Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen and the problematic imperatives inscribed by the politics of bourgeois respectability. Her interpretations challenge previous readings of these authors as providing a liberated model of New Negro womanhood, and propose, instead, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as the first text that successfully recaptures a subjectivity that is both sexual and spiritual. Her reading of Janie Crawford as a sexual/textual foremother provides the necessary theoretical framing from which the subsequent chapters proceed.

Many may view Weir-Soley’s professed effort to capture a “unitary subjectivity” for black women that is “transnationally, transculturally, and trans historically coterminous” (6) as problematically essentialist. Weir-Soley, however, convincingly demonstrates how black women writers function to “reestablish the interdependence between spirituality and sexuality that is central to the formation of black women’s identities” (3) through the explication of new-world Yoruba-based lwas (or goddesses). Her attention to...