Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels

Conclusion

Conclusion In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a group of African American women’s novels reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism. Women’s work—organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping, inscribing, archiving, mothering, and writing—constantly produces a cultural nation. When Minnie Ransom heals Velma Henry in The Salt Eaters; when Shange’s Indigo creates dolls made of foodstuffs from across the African diaspora; when Avey Johnson performs the Big Drum Dance in Praisesong for the Widow; when Cocoa celebrates Candle Walk in Mama Day; and when the Convent women paint themselves on a cellar floor in Paradise, these are rituals for fashioning self and community. These forms of women’s work, all simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, both depend on the black arts tenet that literature should do work in the world and offer a feminist critique of BAM. Novels of the cultural nationalist revision expand the genre, gender, and geography of BAM and break with its realist bent. Authors in this constellation turn away from strict realism, using magic, conjure, and the extrareal to claim cultural nationalism as process and practice. Madhu Dubey writes that “conjuring and orality combine to produce an emphatically antimodern, anti-urban, and antitextual model of community” in some contemporary African American novels (Signs 170). This is problematic for Dubey because “certain racial minority groups become the bearers of sheer, untranslatable difference” (23). The literary moment I have charted in the preceding chapters refuses to make black women “bearers of sheer, untranslatable difference” by rendering women’s work specific, visible, 174 / WOMEN’S WORK and local. The novels examined in Women’s Work transmit information through text and performance, traverse both rural and urban spaces, and look to the past primarily to inform a future-oriented stance. They insist on marrying the meta and material to give specificity to practices of community rather than allowing African American women characters to become “bearers of sheer, untranslatable difference.” Women’s work in these novels is a theoretical intervention; these novels define identity and revise cultural nationalism through the specific and local work of organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping, and inscribing. In this vein, I hope to have taken up here the call that Deborah McDowell issues in the closing chapter of The Changing Same, for scholars to “bring ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ into a productive tension that would force a re-evaluation on each side” (167). A complex, sometimes uneasy entanglement of theory and practice characterizes the novels of the cultural nationalist revision. Each act of organizing, cooking, mapping , dancing, and inscribing in these novels insists on the simultaneity of theorizing and practicing nation and other communities. I am particularly concerned with the stakes that McDowell describes: “When the writings of black women and other critics of color are excluded from the category of theory, it must be partly because theory has been reduced to a very particular practice” (169). This matters for the study of African American literature, to be sure, but for literary study more generally as well. The implicit hierarchical model of theory and practice depends not only on a false binary but also on raced and gendered assumptions about what constitutes intellectual work. Accepting this dichotomy and locating practice but not theory in African American women’s writings both marginalizes the study of these works and impoverishes the humanities. Bambara, Shange, Naylor, Marshall, and Morrison break down divisions between theory and practice and resist an oral/written binary. They claim all of it as women’s work and depict that work in their fiction . The relationship of theory and practice as mutually constitutive in these novels helps to account for their continuing reliance on cultural nationalism long after nation has fallen out of fashion in academic discourse . The “antitextual model” that Dubey describes, one that includes Naylor and Morrison in her reading, promises a seductive “community of cultural insiders engaged in harmonious, crisis-free, acts of knowing, speaking, and listening” (Signs 170). In fact, tension, dissent, and conflict saturate the practice of nation in a literary moment that begins with The Salt Eaters and ends with Paradise. I hope to have illuminated this, in part, by reading the contemporary cultural nationalist revision through conclusion / 175 the writings of Bambara, who, as Dubey cedes, takes up “issues of ancestry , conjuring, oral tradition, or the South in the city” without “offer[ing] readers the fix of tribal values or aestheticized racial difference” (237). As Dubey...