Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Chapter 7: Naming and Proclaiming the Self: Black Feminist Literary History Making

Chapter 7 Naming and Proclaiming the Self BLACK FEMINIST LITERARY HISTORY MAKING Joycelyn Moody I have been . . . thinking about ways in which books get not only reread but also rewritten—both in one’s own language (with the ambivalence of the writer and the back-and-forth between editor and writer), and in translation. The liberties translators take that enhance; the ones taken that diminish. And for me, the alarm. There is always the threat of not being taken seriously, of having the work reduced to social anthropology, of having the politics of one’s own language, the politics of another language bury, rather than expose, the reader’s own politics. —Toni Morrison, “Home,” 1997 To prepare for an upcoming research excursion, I read Under Its Generous Dome: The Collections and Programs of the American Antiquarian Society and A Quarter Century of Visiting Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, 1972–97, publications the AAS has sent to all of next year’s designated scholars. I will be in residence there in April 2003, so this spring I want to take advantage of my proximity in central New York. During my fellowship month I will read through the AAS’s extensive collection of early American newspapers and broadsides, specifically to locate news accounts, graphic images, all that’s there on black women 107 108 Joycelyn Moody enslaved in antebellum America—research for a book that will explore how some such women managed to get their lives into print in spite of their illiteracy. Reading Under Its Generous Dome, I am surprised to find extremely few references to Africans, African Americans, slavery, even the Civil War. First, I check the index and table of contents: no obvious signs there. Then I skim every page, looking for the barest allusions to my topic. I get very pessimistic—and begin to wonder why my proposal was accepted. What does it mean that the collection, which prides itself so unabashedly on having archived just about every imaginable “profound and mundane” document, save “a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America” (Neely), either in fact has very few items representing early African American culture, or in 1992 does not consider those particular holdings noteworthy in a book boasting the Society’s resources? Then I read A Quarter Century of Visiting Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, 1972–97, looking again, or still, for materials on enslaved women of the antebellum era. This time, even less. I had spotted a photograph of the 1992 AAS staff in Under Its Generous Dome. In the second book, there’re photos, too: one, a snapshot of shelves at the American Antiquarian Society, teeming with texts researched there. I recognize a book prominent in the display: Nell I. Painter’s biography Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol. Painter has extolled the resources at Worcester, but I wonder that none of the materials she must have consulted are anywhere highlighted in these two Society publications. So now I want to know how Painter intuited that she could research Truth there and find her. Next I listen again to a brief interview with the Society’s current president, Ellen Dunlap. She is talking to Barbara Neely, host of Commonwealth Journal, WUMB’s weekly arts radio show. Dunlap identifies herself as a Texan and “sounds white.” She does not mention slavery; the closest detail is her note that the Society’s thousands of collectibles extend to “the end of Reconstruction.” Again, I’m confused: how can archives of early Americana not contain the stuff of slavery, the greatest catastrophe in the nation’s history between the Revolution and Reconstruction ? Why a “Reconstruction” anyway, but for slavery?1 The process of reconstructing nineteenth-century African American women’s literary history begets many challenges. To be sure, the specific difficulties pervading my research exacerbate the academic’s usual anxieties about scholarly work and worth. After all, as Hattie Gossett chastises, “Who told [me] anybody wants to hear from [me]? [I] aint nothing but a black woman!” Nonetheless, I go on finding ways to conduct this research because early black women’s performativity 109 Naming and Proclaiming the Self thrills me and because it strives still to fight injustice directed against U.S. black women. As long as folks equate being black and female with being unintelligent and incapable, there is a critical need for my work. Fulfilling my...