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Introduction
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part 1 Defining Black Feminist Criticism Introduction ARleNe R. KeIzeR The essays in this section highlight the metacritical dimension of Barbara Christian’s analytical writing. In spite of the range and abundance of Christian’s writing on African American literature and culture, she has become known as the author of “The Race forTheory,” an essay that sparked a polarizing controversy among AfricanAmericanist literary critics in the late 1980s and reverberated into the next decade.1 In their haste to attack the essentialist aspects of “The Race for Theory,” critics disregarded two crucial components of that essay: its argument for an expanded definition of theory and its articulation of Christian’s own critical methodology . Far from being antitheoretical, Christian theorized through literature, using the knowledge represented by writers and their characters as a basis for thinking about African American literature as a whole. “The Race for Theory” articulates a practice as surely as it critiques another. Throughout her career, Christian was dedicated to analyzing and critiquing, when necessary, the practice and the general direction of literary criticism. Two threads run through the essays in “Defining Black Feminist Criticism.” One is the opposition between knowledge and theory. What Christian insists upon, over and over again, is the idea that what the subaltern knows may not easily fit into an available theoretical framework. Her concern was that such knowledge not be silenced simply because it is incompatible with prevailing systems of thought. In fact, that incompatibility, difference, or insubordi- nation was, for her, one of the most important qualities of literary texts. Christian envisioned literary criticism as elegant backtalk that would support the contrary impulses of the literature itself. She recognized that some deemed her incapable of producing a comprehensive black feminist literary theory, but she made it clear that this was, in fact, a refusal of a demand from the reigning critical establishment. In “The Race forTheory,” she writes, “I, for one, am tired of being asked to produce a black feminist literary theory as if I were a mechanical man. . . . Since I can count on one hand the number of people attempting to be black feminist literary critics in the world today, I consider it presumptuous of me to invent a theory of how we ought to read.” And yet, she produced one of the most substantial and influential collections of black feminist literary theorizing that we have, in addition to nurturing dozens of new black feminist literary critics (too many of us now to be counted on one or even two hands). Another significant thread tying these essays together is denoted by variations of the term “fixing.” Versions of this word appear in every article, and in some it is repeated several times. In “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway,” “What Celie KnowsThatY ouShouldKnow,”“TheRaceforTheory,”and“Does Theory Play Well in the Classroom?” Christian insists upon the danger of fixing the literary text with “theory” like a fly in amber. For her, black feminist literary practice demands that the dynamism of fiction, poetry, and drama be matched by an equally dynamic criticism. Frameworks that seek to subdue or oversimplify the idiosyncrasies and the fluidity of literary works are anathema to her. In “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,” however, Christian goes further, identifying and analyzing the reparative properties of ToniMorrison’suseofWestAfricanspiritualtraditions.Byreading Beloved as a “fixing ceremony,” a healing practice, Christian also points toward the possibility of criticism that might function in a similar way. She crafts the essay as a “fixing methodology” that can serve as a model for other critics who want to use knowledge that comes from “below” as part of their interpretive strategies. Finally, one of the most important principles that Barbara [3.144.251.72] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 07:50 GMT) Christian imparted through her writing and her pedagogy was the significance of naming one’s personal relationship to the literature about which one writes, even if one does not explicitly discuss that relationship in one’s scholarly essays. She herself did this consistently and courageously, while knowing and counting the cost of her “lifesaving” critical practice. ...