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

In Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature Susana M. Morris joins a growing critical discussion of the pitfalls of respectability politics in Black communities in the United States and Latin America. The dominant strategy for the betterment of Black communities for the majority of the twentieth century, respectability politics advocates conformity to traditional middle-class values and the nuclear family as the path to full citizenship in a hierarchical society. Morris’s primary aim is to reveal how the works of several Black women authors express frustration with, and offer viable alternatives to, a paradoxical respectability that preaches empowerment through submission to sexual, cultural, and economic hierarchies and demands adherence to a normative lifestyle that fails to reflect the reality of Black communities. Examining Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Sapphire’s Push, Morris identifies a discursive trend critical of repressive iterations of the nuclear family, rigid and unequal gender roles, and the appropriation of imperialist ideologies rather than diasporic tools already in place within Black communities.

Making use of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy, in which the dominant power structure implicates oppressed individuals in their own marginalization, Morris highlights in each novel the entrapment of Black women in a restrictive culture of respectability. In Push, Precious struggles to emerge from a lower-class culture whose self-image is shaped by pervasive notions of Black pathology, while in Praisesong for the Widow, Avey successfully rises out of the lower class through conscious denial of her community, finding only isolation in respectability. Finally, Annie John and Breath, Eyes, Memory portray a misogynistic and imperialist world in which outwardly powerful women and matriarchal families exercise power in affirmation of existing hegemonies. The solution, Morris argues, inasmuch as solutions can exist in each novel, is the adoption of an alternative “ethic of community support and accountability,” which looks beyond the narrow scope of the nuclear family and makes use of preexisting diasporic traditions rather than forcing assimilation into imperialist cultures. By forming meaningful familial, sexual, or friendly bonds, usually with other women, and by reaffirming their embeddedness in collective diasporic histories through non-Western rituals like the “ring shout” in Praisesong for the Widow or obeah in Annie John, Black women are able to exercise power outside of the kyriarchical structure of their society, challenging sexual, cultural, and economic hierarchies associated with respectability.

Morris’s contribution to recent dialogues about respectability politics is illuminating and original, and though her claim in the introduction that Close Kin and Distant Relatives “enacts a paradigm shift in literary studies” is, perhaps, an overstatement, her analysis begs for further scholarly attention. Though she casts her net over a wide geographical area spanning a broad range of cultural contexts in the United States and Latin America, she acknowledges the limitations of her study; her approach is nuanced and she is careful to avoid unjustly collapsing racial and sexual politics across very different communities.

Particularly worthy of attention is Morris’s fourth and final chapter on Sapphire’s Push, an exceptionally thorough and engaging piece of scholarship. Neatly contextualizing Precious Johnson in a complex lower-class environment of the Clinton era shaped by welfare reform and Black Nationalism, and dominated by theories of respectability and Black pathology, Morris gracefully unpacks the interconnecting sexual, cultural, and economic discourses that form the novel’s oppressive kyriarchical power structure. A seamless blend of historical context, analysis, and theory, this chapter is, despite its brevity, a work of formidable depth.

That said, after being so impressed by the last chapter one wishes that the work as a whole were more cohesive. The chapters are somewhat disjointed, and there is some unnecessary reiteration of key concepts within Close Kin and Distant Relatives’ relatively brief length. The cohesion of Morris’s work...