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In what public discourse does the reference to black people not exist? It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people is not only a major referent in the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate. It is there in the construction of a free and public school system . . . and legal definitions of justice. . . . The presence of black people is inherent, along with gender and family ties, in the earliest lesson every child is taught regarding his or her distinctiveness. Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating twentiethcentury self. —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Although the role of insurgent intellectual suits my temperament, I’m really not all doom and gloom. One source of my optimism stems from the resilience of the human spirit. Another stems from the remarkable creativity of black people. I’m especially fascinated by how creative thinking and artistic production respond to the dynamics of race, gender, class, culture, and community. In the early 1990s, Michele Wallace wrote a widely published essay, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” which crystallized the dilemmas of black feminist intellectuals. Since the publication of this essay, black intellectuals have been discovered by the broader community, and their overall role in contemporary society continues to be defined through such works as Joy James’s Transcending the Talented Tenth, Alice Walker’s The Same River Twice, bell hooks and Cornel West’s Breaking Bread, Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire, Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing, and Identity, and Patricia Hill Collins’s Fighting Words. Wallace’s essay, however, is among the first works to identify key issues involved in creating black feminist discourse. It is also among the first to focus on the connection between community and black women’s creativity. As such, the essay contains fundamental insights and raises significant concerns about black women’s creativity, community, and struggle for a just society. 6. The Particulars of Un-Negation 69 I Both versions of “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity ”— one published in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Reading Black, Reading Feminist and the other in Michele Wallace’s book Invisibility Blues—make compelling yet disconcerting statements about the creativity of black women.1 Wallace’s main premise is that black women are systematically denied access to channels for the production of intellectual discourse and creativity. She argues that black women’s experiences are structured by the dominant culture in ways that place those experiences and their wisdom outside of the language, history, and tradition of critical discourse. As a result, Wallace argues, there is a radical disconnection between what black women create and what society considers to be knowledge. This argument and Wallace’s assertion that black women’s creative expression springs from a desire “to make the world a place that will be safe for women of color, their men, and their children” (216) raise important questions regarding the role of black feminists in contemporary culture. For example, are black women (whether they call themselves feminists or not) using their creativity to make the world safer? Given that Wallace defines the goal of black feminist creative production as political transformation for black people as a group, several questions are more to the point: Are black feminist intellectuals and activists assuming leadership in the long march toward a better world? Are we challenging cultural hegemony, or, having made a small but important niche for ourselves, are we the minimally/minimal established/establishment? Are we the outlaw renegades and truth tellers of public discourse, or are we simply the predictable minority report? Wallace observes that the intellectual production of black feminists has not successfully challenged what she calls the “exclusionary parlor games of canon formation and the production of knowledge” (214). Her essay contends that the cultural elite and black feminists themselves are responsible for the lack of theoretical analysis by black women, because each group has deemed black women incapable of such production: “To the extent that art exists as a by-product of diverse acts of interpretation and analysis, black feminist creativity is virtually non-existent.” She continues: “Prevented from assuming a commensurable role in critical theory and production of knowledge by a combination of external and internal pressures—economic and psychological—[black feminist creativity...

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