Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings

Preface

Preface “Black females are valued by no one.” —Motivational Educational Entertainment In “The Height of Disrespect,” Thulani Davis emphasizes the objectification of young black women in hip-hop lyrics and videos and chronicles the relationship between the way these women are portrayed and what Davis views as the lack of self-respect exhibited by many of these performers. Davis’s concerns are shared by many cultural critics who believe that hip-hop culture disproportionately contributes both to the exploitation of black women and to the dehumanizing exhibition of black female bodies.1 Conversely, in Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper argues that Jamaican dancehall culture (a space akin to hip-hop culture) in fact allows women a “potentially liberating space” for erotic exploration (17). There is a definite corollary between the discourse around dancehall and the controversies surrounding hip-hop, with respect to the violent and overtly sexual language as well as the physical and verbal portrayal of black women in both spaces. Nevertheless, Cooper warns against the tendency to overstate the exploitation of the black female body in such a space: “the joyous display of the female body in the dance is perceived as a pornographic devaluation of woman” (17). Cooper argues that such an analysis misses the point and suggests that it denies women agency and the freedom to choose what to do with their bodies. Cooper goes even further, arguing “transgressively for the freedom of women to claim a self-pleasuring identity that may even be explicitly homoerotic” (17). However, for the black woman, any performance of sexuality, no matter how liberating, is already preconditioned by historical baggage. Both positions reveal the almost antithetical ways in which black women’s sexual performances have historically been read. Black women are either fully appropriated victims of patriarchal sexism or fully empowered subjects confidently challenging bourgeois respectability. While both Cooper and Davis make critical interventions into this disputation, neither position, I would argue, tells the full story. The opening epigraph is shocking not merely because it is an overstatement but because it represents, arguably, an over-simplification of the facts. xiv / Preface Long before the emergence of hip-hop culture, black females were devalued, dehumanized, and disgraced in both private and popular arenas, and at the same time black women have gone to great measures to contravene, resist, and frustrate the devaluation of their identities since their arrival on the New World stage. Given the legacy of the physical and sexual exploitation of the black female body and image, the earliest black women writers and activists were conflicted about how to represent black women as both moral and sexual beings. Overwhelmingly, they chose not to represent black women as sexual beings. Such drastic measures were deemed necessary to counter the damaging stereotypes of the black woman as hyper-sexual and/or sexually deviant . This unbalanced representation of the black woman continued well into the twentieth century until Zora Neale Hurston broke the pattern with her character Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Indeed, Their Eyes Were Watching God represents a revolutionary shift in the representation of the black woman, a shift that recognizes what Audre Lorde dubs “the power of the erotic”—the ability to form a creative and productive alliance between sexual and spiritual energies. In this study, I chart the development of this new representation of the black woman in the works of black women writing across the diaspora. I argue that works such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with Tears, and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones echo Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in their evocation of black female empowerment through a form of embodied spirituality that recognizes the centrality of the erotic. Notes Epigraph: This quotation is attributed to the authors of a study conducted in 2004 by Motivational Educational Entertainment, a Philadelphia communications firm that researches and markets to urban and low-income groups. 1. See Ayanna’s “The Exploitation of Women in Hip-Hop Culture.” See also Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew,” for a cogent critique of the case against the rap group 2 Live Crew who were arrested and charged under a Florida obscenity statute after appearing in a Florida nightclub in 1990. Crenshaw wonders whether Henry Louis Gates was wrong-headed in citing the differences in African-American vernacular expression in his defense of 2 Live Crew. She states, “Ultimately...