New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000

Introduction

part 3 Black Feminist Criticism in the Academy Introduction GloRIA BoWles Barbara Christian wrote these essays a quarter century after her initial years as a teacher and graduate student in New York City. During her distinguished career, she would play a major role in the founding and development ofAfro-American studies, ethnic studies , and women’s studies.The essays in this section trace the final period of her career, thus long past the revolutionary peak of the civil rights and women’s movements and the ethnic and women’s studies programs inspired by them. Today these movements and the long struggle to challenge the absences in university research and curriculum are a distant memory for those who participated in change and a historical artifact for the teachers and students who now expect an inclusive education. It may be surprising to some that a chair ofAfro-American studies and one of the founders of the ethnic studies Ph.D. program at Berkeley was also central to the development of women’s studies. Always willing to enter into coalitions for common cause, Barbara Christian nonetheless often felt pushed and pulled in various directions . The problem was in part practical; as the first tenured black woman at Berkeley, she was endlessly called upon to represent both “Black” and “Woman.” The challenge was intellectual as well, since white women and women of color came to feminist debateswithdifferentexperiencesandthuswithdifferentagendas for change. Women had to learn from each other. The solitary black woman at the university was often a bridge between various points of departure. At Berkeley, Barbara Christian’s classes gave many white students their first opportunities to enter through literature into the experiences of blacks in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this seemed a one-way street. How does one divide one’s time between teaching whites and educating students of color, who often have different questions? Many women of color felt apart from women’s studies programs dominated in the seventies and eighties by white and lesbian issues. In her teaching and writing, Christian bravely lays out these and other conflicts, not resolving them, but in effect asking us to face up to them. The titles of many of her essays, beginning with a provocative question, capture her method, one of dialogue and conversation.Afterreading her,weareimpressedbytheenormous scholarly and pedagogical challenge of keeping race, gender, and class within our sights. Like the writing of the Afro-American novelists and poets whose work she unearthed, Barbara Christian’s criticism was always rooted in historical and political reality. She believed in the relationship between thought and action, community and university . Her essays are expressions of emotion and passion as well as intellectual analysis. She often decried narrow ideas of “political,” as in candidates and parties, for she saw politics as an expression of power relations inside and outside the university. Her approach was no longer au courant in the literary criticism of the eighties and nineties, dominated by the sometimes arcane musings of U.S. scholars whose heads had been turned by postmodern French philosophers—read, I might add, in translation and often without a deep understanding of the European context. “I find the narrative theorizing of say a Toni Morrison or an Alice Walker to be far more dynamic, significant, and useful than the majority of lit crit theory being published today,” she wrote.1 Barbara Christian remained a political thinker long after many had abandoned analytical and practical politics for the more ethereal realms of “high” theory.Toward the end of her academic career (shehadintendedtoretireat60),shethus found herselfswimming upstream yet again. The new struggle demanded a shoring up of critical perspectives based not on rigid categories or fragmentation , but on interrelationships, intersections, and interdisciplinarity . At the same time, her approach entailed an analysis of the realities on the ground. In the late eighties and early nineties, Barbara Christian could often be heard reflecting on what had been accomplished during the movements for change and at the same time wondering whether future generations would carry on the work. This question of legacy hovers over all of the essays of this section. In these later years, she was as interested in teaching her students about the facts of life in the academy as in introducing them to the arenas of study she helped to found.This is the voice we hear in the “intergenerational polylogue” first published in differences...