African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship

Notes

193 Notes Introduction 1. In addition to Lorde, my paper also discussed the works of Susan Bordo, Barbara Creed, Bonnie Smith and Beth Hutchison, Judith Halberstam, Charlotte Bunch and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I used Evelyn Hammonds, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Barbara Christian to frame the argument on black women’s embodied experiences and how race and class impacted these experiences. 2. Lorde’s claim that much of white feminist scholarship intensified the oppression of black women led to an angry confrontation, most notably in an open letter, with radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly. After receiving no response to a letter she wrote to Mary Daly within four months, Lorde opened the letter to the community of women. Yet again, we witness Lorde challenging established boundaries of private and public, of the personal and the political. See Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 66–71. 3. I would like to emphasize the dual usage of the word disease in the text. On one hand, disease registers uneasiness; on the other hand, it speaks to biological illness or disease. 4. The term create dangerously comes from Albert Camus’s “L’artiste et son temps.” See Danticat’s Create Dangerously, 13. 5. Decades earlier Langston Hughes articulated an analogous phenomenal phrase in his instructive essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: “We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too” (958). Symbolically, Hughes espoused a similar message in his address of the black artist’s attainment of freedom and independence via resistance. 6. Dagmar Schultz’s documentary The Berlin Years, 1984 to 1992, chronicles Lorde’s invaluable contribution as a social justice and literary icon. Professor Emerita Anne Adams presented it at the African Literature Association Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 2013. The year 2012 marked the twentieth anniversary of Lorde’s death. Schultz confirmed that in honor of Lorde’s legacy, four films would be brought to universities , libraries, and community venues. 7. Like Lorde, Christian was also a victim of breast cancer. 8. De Veaux specifically referenced The Black Unicorn and The Cancer Journals. 9. We witness this challenge to fixed definitions but more importantly to male-centered definitions firsthand in Lorde’s brilliant creation of a new literary genre that she titles “biomythography,” a combination of history, myth, autobiography, and fiction. Lorde’s in-fusion of her personal experience with cancer, politics, and social issues continues this tradition. 194 · Notes to Pages 6–21 10. Barbara Smith concurs with Christian as she points out that it is practical to strengthen the tradition of black feminists by looking for “precedents and insights in interpretation within the works of other Black women.” See Toward a Black Feminist Criticism, 7. 11. Here I appropriate Morrison’s use of folks, which alludes to both folk narratives that have been discredited by the mainstream and to the creators, the folks, of oral (folk) narratives. 12. In analyzing Baldwin’s reaction to Chartres, Morrison underscores that he could not respond the way Henry Adams did “with subjective pride in the achievement of Chartres” because “the intimacy between the writer and the historical artifact did not exist in the same way for Baldwin” (35). 13. “The Feminization of International Labor Migration,” United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, http://www.renate -europe.net/downloads/Documents/Feminization_of_Migration-INSTRAW2007.pdf. For further discussion on this topic, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild ’s Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. 14. Monica Boyd and Elizabeth Grieco, “Women and Migration: Incorporating Gender into International Migration Theory,” Migration Fundamentals, March 2003, http:// www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=106. 15. Ibid. 16. I later articulate the complex, conflict-ridden relationship that the United States has had and continues to have with Haiti and its citizens. 17. I locate “deviance” within the parameters of queer theory, offering both a literal and allegorical reading of the term. 18. Audre Lorde’s parents came to New York City from Grenada. 19. Lorde’s memoirs, The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, function as travelogues as they map her transnational journeys across borders and boundaries. 20. In Grewal and Kaplan’s collection, Scattered Hegemonies, Mary Layoun “explores the problematic of the metaphoric use of ‘woman’ as ‘nation’” (22). 21. This fierce interrogation is rendered most palpable in her new literary genre, her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. 22. Transnational citizenship will be used interchangeably with...