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Reviewed by:
  • Saints Sinners Survivors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, and: The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction
  • Karen Chandler (bio)
Saints Sinners Survivors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature by Trudier Harris. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 218 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper.
The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction by Angelyn Mitchell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 179 pp., $59.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper.

Many general-interest bookstores have changed in the last few years in response to the growing market for distinct African-American literary genres. Stores that already featured "African American Studies" sections now also have shelves devoted to "Black Romance" and "African American Detective Fiction." This burgeoning interest in African-American genres is also evident in the appearance of imprints that court black writers and target black readers and others interested in black themes. Random House, for instance, offers Strivers Row, an imprint of narratives by African Americans that explore the emotional, affective, and social challenges of class mobility or precariousness. Websites devoted to particular genres or to African-American literature in general advertise such books. Thus, in addition to umbrella groups, such as the Black Writers Alliance, that attract and organize writers and promote their books to readers through the Internet, there are groups that sponsor sites focusing on black mysteries, lesbian and gay literature, and science fiction.

Literary scholars are responding to the boost in marketing particular genres of African American literature with works of criticism designed both for academic audiences and for serious nonprofessional readers. Two recent examples are the books under consideration here. Harris's study of potentially pathological strength in black women characters examines a range of genres, including satire, realism, fantasy, and blends of the real and fantastic. Harris sees the strong black woman as so central to African-American literature that the figure threatens to disable writers in various [End Page 225] genres from creating more positive alternative images of African-American womanhood. She presents her book as a challenge to writers and readers to weigh the aesthetic and social consequences of misguided and destructively strong women's dominance in black cultural expression.

Although Mitchell's book also treats the strength of African-American women, instead of examining an array of genres, it focuses on one that she defines and theorizes: the liberatory narrative about enslaved women'sstruggles to gain autonomy in societies that depend on gender and racial oppression and stratification. These narratives draw on conventions of the 19th- and early 20th-century slave narrative to revise them, foregrounding protagonists' interiors in ways the traditional texts do not. The consequence, according to Mitchell, is a new narrative genre that serves as a therapeutic guide for readers in the present. In tracking the ways women protagonists fight to preserve their dignity and to register their agency, contemporary readers can be freed to look at history in new ways and to see their relationship to this history clearly. For all the differences between the two books, both Mitchell and Harris examine the nuances and complications of black female protagonists' heroic strength in their struggles against oppression and speculate about the possible effects of these struggles on readers.

Harris's careful readings of satirical texts like Dorothy West's The Living is Easy and realist ones like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying more than validates her assessment that "this thing called strength, this thing we applaud so much in black women, could also have detrimental effects and consequences," namely "dysfunctionality in literary families" (10). In a perceptive discussion of Mama Lena Younger, the maternal figure in Hansberry's play, Harris points out how her authoritative words and actions limit other family members' integrity and stunt their will. Harris acknowledges Mama Lena's good intentions, but also notes that her strength helps to maintain a status quo that especially keeps black men socially marginalized. The emasculating mother is a dangerous stereotype, of course, but characters like Mama Lena and Tante Lou of A Lesson Before Dying, vividly embody...

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