Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature by Susana M. Morris (review)

Since Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s introduction of the term “the politics of respectability,” African American scholars across the disciplines have produced a staggering array of takes on this concept, applying it from the post-Reconstruction period to the present. In her elegantly argued first book, Susana M. Morris reveals a vital, emphatically diasporic literary conversation about the politics of respectability within late-twentieth-century novels by black women. Morris proposes that several writers in the United States and the Caribbean voice a unified indictment of respectability politics through their portrayals of diasporic black families.

Close Kin and Distant Relatives focuses on Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and Sapphire’s Push (1996). Although respectability takes on diverse forms in the range of societies explored in these texts, the dangers of respectability remain constant. Through the depiction of ambivalent familial relations, Morris argues, these writers express the destructive impact of repressive respectability politics on black families but also model alternative conceptions of family through which black women find empowerment and mutual support.

To explicate writers’ portrayals of strained families, Morris introduces the concept of a “paradox of respectability” (3). The paradox of respectability names black families’ aspiration to narrow ideals of propriety—such as rigidly normative gender roles, heterosexual marriage, and the nuclear family—even as those ideals prove difficult or impossible to fulfill (3). This contradiction damages family bonds and sparks repression, resentment, and even violence between family members. Thus, adherence to the politics of respectability reinforces “kyriarchy,” an alternative term for patriarchy that Morris draws from feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in order to emphasize “the potential opportunities for even marginalized peoples to be complicit in the oppression of others” (28). Kyriarchy describes the way in which repression and violence within respectability-obsessed families buttress racist, capitalist, and colonial structures of oppression—the very conditions that the politics of respectability is designed to overcome. In black women’s literature, Morris suggests, the paradox of respectability and its ties to kyriarchy provide an explanatory framework for black family struggles that opposes the toxic discourse of black pathology.

Morris identifies “ambivalence” as the key symptom of fictional black families’ respectability maladies. Black women characters’ ambivalence toward family duties and bonds is not a form of passivity or paralysis but instead a means of communicating and negotiating the push and pull of loyalty and estrangement in families caught in the paradox of respectability. Ambivalence, for Morris, allows black women to “craft antiracist feminist narratives about family amid hegemonic pressures to do otherwise” (6). While Morris’s readings of ambivalence in the texts occasionally seem a bit stretched, the term captures the way in which the double binds of family can mirror the paradox of respectability.

Moving beyond ambivalence, Morris contends, black women writers advance constructive alternatives to the politics of respectability that are based in flexible definitions of kinship and gender roles and “an ethic of community support and accountability” (11). Characters discover and maintain this alternative ethic largely through African diasporic cultural rites, particularly those practiced by women. Through dance, storytelling, and traditional healing, among other forms, characters insist on “transgressive forms of community,” such as circles of fictive kin or homosexual partnerships (40). Black women in these texts, Morris stresses, learn that their cultures have already provided them with the resources needed to assert alternatives to respectability. It is this turn of Morris’s argument, linking family dynamics and Afrodiasporic arts to the racial and colonial systems of oppression always present in these texts, that makes her study a compelling and comprehensive new reading of late-twentieth-century black women’s literature.

The four chapters on Marshall, Kincaid, Danticat, and Sapphire are admirably cohesive, closely following the promised argument without forcing the point. Because Morris reads thoughtfully and writes gracefully, and because her argument allows...