Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women's Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text by Kimberly Nichele Brown (review)

Kimberly Nichele Brown's Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women's Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text is an exciting study of black women's literary and cultural production since 1970. Specifically, Brown argues that in the last forty years some black women's work has been marked by a commitment to decolonization and that this focus reflects a continuation of the Black Aesthetics Movement. Brown understands that there might be some risk in arguing for the relevance of black aesthetics in regard to work by contemporary black women, but her rich and convincing book is up to the task.

Brown grounds this study in the construct of a "revolutionary diva subjectivity," the idiom she uses to characterize a black woman's position not as emasculator or aggressor but as a creative and politically minded subject, one who writes as much from imagination as she does from experience (p. 5). This black woman subject is intentional about intervening in the public and social discourse about black women and is aware of her positionality in the fray of race and gender. What is striking about Brown's engagement of this notion of a revolutionary diva subjectivity is her ability to use it to expose aspects of black cultural and literary studies, including audience, authenticity, and publicness (as well as her exquisite extended scrutiny of the term "diva").

The book begins with a keen awareness of the limitations of the public characterizations of black women, especially artists, retracing some of the debates of the 1980s and 1990s that seemed to pit black women writers against their black male counterparts. Brown is efficient in reminding the reader of the controversies that surrounded Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, and Alice Walker, and engages these moments to notice how much a discourse of double consciousness informs the expectations we have of black writers. This argument, which unfolds in the preface and the first chapter, is one of the strongest in the book, partly because of the historical depth of Brown's interrogation. In a close study of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and James Weldon Johnson's "The Dilemma of the Negro Author" (1928), Brown asserts that the construct of double consciousness has imposed a standard of authenticity on the black writer, such that the writer is expected to write from an "autobiographical subjectivity" (p. 8). This expectation creates a double-voiced text that is assumed to "cater to white audiences" (p. 9).

For Brown, the legacy of this framework is that it manifests (unconsciously) as a kind of colonized mindset in contemporary scholarship but also in the popular imagination. This is where Brown finds the Black Aesthetics Movement useful; it allows her to devise "an alternative theoretical paradigm" that, rather than focusing on "the psychic and structural doubleness of African American subjects and texts," instead analyzes their decolonizing properties (p. 9). Acknowledging that "decolonizing texts have always been a part of the African American literary tradition," Brown nonetheless makes a prudent case for the specific "decolonizing components of the black aesthetic movement" (pp. 48-49). Brown's interest in decolonization is not novel, though her commitment to employing it in regard to contemporary black women's work feels refreshing. Furthermore, her knowledge about audience and public intellectualism is excellent, especially her diligent and thoughtful dismantling of double consciousness as a privileged idiom in black cultural studies. Brown achieves this dismantling through generous scholarship. She takes the legacy of double consciousness seriously rather than rejecting it merely because it is so sacred. Indeed, she argues for a new double consciousness for the black writer—not a conflict between being Negro and American but the "contradiction between being both an individual and part of a larger perceived black collective" (p. 55). Brown's deployment of this double consciousness of the black artist is superlative and...