Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema

3. Reclaiming Africa: Black Women’s Discourses in Daughters of the Dust

There is always a danger, when using categorizing terms such as black women’s discourses, of creating intellectual ghettoes that reinforce margins and peripheries by assigning them convenient designations .1 The term blackness, for example, is made relevant to discourses of racism and cultural difference because it carries encoded within it skin color, a history of oppression, and the racist concept of white superiority (Boyce Davies 1994, 7). Such a term demonstrates that language and terminology are politically loaded and carry with them whole histories and ideologies that may be obscured by familiarity or presumptions based on criteria that lurk beneath the surface. The exposure of such limiting factors is inherent to any discussion surrounding issues of representation and subjectivity for black women because “it is the convergence of multiple places and cultures that re-negotiates the terms of Black women’s experience that in turn negotiates and renegotiates their identities” (3). Hence, the very movement between differing subjectivities offers the potential for myriad ways of defining and interrogating black women’s differences within an often-hostile terrain of cultural, racial, and gender imperatives aimed at delimiting that expression .2 three Reclaiming Africa Black Women’s Discourses in Daughters of the Dust Black Women’s Discourses in Daughters of the Dust 81 In the quest for a means to adequately express black experience in the black diaspora, black writers and thinkers have always found it necessary to explode the barriers of Eurocentric frameworks that historically began with a racist belief in black inferiority. This is especially true in the area of women’s studies, where feminism has generally been proscribed within the narrow circumference of universalist constructs that foreground white Western concerns and worldviews. For those black writers and thinkers who wish to explore black women’s issues, these assumptions are at best flawed and at worst representative of the very systemic oppression they wish to critique. For example, Clenora Hudson-Weems describes the uneasy relationship with feminism when she states that some Africana women reluctantly turn to feminism because frameworks suitable for describing a black woman’s experiences are not readily available or accepted in mainstream academic thought with the same fervor as feminism (1994, 18). This reflects a profound gap between the ideological foundations of Western feminism and its failure to adequately account for discourses of race. Based on the experience that “feminist terminology does not accurately reflect their reality or their struggle,” some black thinkers have reassessed this troubled relationship with feminism and have developed new frameworks that directly address the very specific needs of black women (18). Such work has resulted in a lively and fruitful debate on the nature of black female experience and the ways in which it might be constituted in theoretical terms. Discourses such as black feminism, for example, have moved issues of race and identity to the forefront of discussions on contemporary theory. As early as 1984, bell hooks argued that “white women who dominate feminist discourse, who for the most part make and articulate feminist theory, have little or no understanding of white supremacy as a racial politic” (1984, 4). Although this appears to suggest that the rise of black feminism, which has always existed in myriad forms, was a reaction to marginalization, it would be more accurate to argue that the gulf between white and black feminisms became insurmountable as the emphasis on women as a universalized category gained momentum.3 The issue for hooks and other black feminists is that the negation of difference failed to account for the powerful force of “fac- chapter 3 82 tors like class, race, religion, [and] sexual preference” on experiences of sexism in different women’s lives (5). This made it imperative for black feminists to conceive and reconfigure new parameters better suited to their needs and desires (10). Far from being simply reactionary, black feminism is a complex response to the realities of black women’s experiences as circumscribed within a “notion of fluidity, multiple identities , [and] repetition which must be multiply articulated” (Boyce Davies 1994, 48). Hence, as black feminism(s) grapple with the dynamic struggles resulting from the interplay between maps and histories, race and sexism, community and individual, one aspect that continually arises is the notion of demolishing boundaries that prevent the voices of black women from being heard in all their diversity. As hooks describes it, black feminism(s) are confrontational to all dominant practices...