Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women (review)

Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. By Jacqueline Jones Royster. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. 352 pp. $45.00 /$19.95 paper.

To understand why Jacqueline Jones Royster has written Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, it is first necessary to comprehend how her work on African American women writers has been received at conferences and other venues. Across these forums, Royster reports that she repeatedly has been met with a "deep disbelief" in both the existence and social agency of the women about whom she writes (3). Over and over she has had to recreate the ground upon which she stands to deliver her work. Rather than retreat in the face of the extra labor entailed in writing for audiences steeped in deep disbelief, Royster wrote Traces, a careful, intricately detailed, and recursive work that establishes that African American women writers have used literacy tirelessly to work for social change.

Just as authors about whom she writes have done before her, Royster uses Traces to inspire change. She illustrates that African American women writers are formidable intellectuals who actively intervene in the oppressive circumstances of their everyday lives. Though focusing primarily on elite African American women of the nineteenth century and examining how they use literacy, Royster ultimately aims to create a suitable place for all African American women writers across history. To the degree that her audience is willing to read and hear what she has to say, Traces fully accomplishes this goal.

Part One, "A Rhetorical View," consists of two chapters in which Royster focuses on the importance of the essay to African American women writers and develops an analytical framework for understanding their rhetorical practices. Chapter One, "In Search of Rivers: Womanist Writers and the Essay," draws upon Alice Walker's essays to develop a framework accounting for the connections between literacy and sociopolitical intent. This chapter outlines Walker's womanist viewpoint, including concern for the lives of black women and the black community and respect for the power of historical knowledge, witnessing, and creating empathy for the oppressed. Chapter Two, "Towards an Analytic Model for Literacy and Sociopolitical Action," establishes African American women's social and political use of literacy "to make sense of lives and conditions that to them do not make sense" (49). Literacy has been a tool to critique and challenge mainstream society.

Part Two, "A Historical View," considers how African American women have acquired literacy and what has shaped their rhetorical orientation and capacities. Chapter Three, "The Genesis of Authority: When African American Women Became American," historicizes black womanhood to locate the sources available to African American women in gaining productive self-concepts and developing their writing and speaking selves. Cultural retention from Africa, memory of ancestral ways, and cultural fusion all figure in Royster's vision of how African American women have internalized an extraordinary sense of social responsibility that they express through literacy. Chapter Four, "Going Against the Grain," traces the rise of literacy among African Americans as it occurred across the nineteenth century and shows how African American women used literacy to imagine and create new social and literary worlds. Chapter Five, "From this Fertile Ground: Formal Training in the Development of Rhetorical Prowess," includes a photographic essay and examines higher education and organized community action in the nineteenth century as resources for extending African American women's rhetorical expertise and activism.

Part Three, "An Ideological View," consists of Chapter Six, "A View from the Bridge: Afrafeminist Ideologies and Rhetorical Studies," where Royster retraces her steps and articulates her standpoint as an afrocentric, feminist researcher and scholar in the field of rhetoric and composition. This chapter illustrates how she has derived her standpoint and has used her substantive experience as a scholar, researcher, teacher, mentor, and administrator to illuminate a path for others to follow.

Not only is Traces a...