The Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery (review)

In Speaking Power, DoVeanna Fulton's declared aim is to identify "forms of passing on family and personal history orally found in Black women's narratives of slavery that subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations of the past that counter the master narrative of . . . American slavery and . . . recogniz[e] the use of oral traditions to relate Black women's experiences as the foundation of a literary tradition" (p. 6). To do so, Fulton focuses on less well-known narratives, such as Louisa Picquet's Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life; C.W. Larison's Sylvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistress and Gand Her Fredom; Mattie J. Jackson's The Story of Mattie J. Jackson; and Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories alongside narratives of symbolic figures, such as Sojourner Truth, the late-nineteenth-century domestic fiction of Frances Harper (Iola Leroy) and Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces), and canonized texts, such as Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Gayl Jone's Corregidora; Toni Morrison's Beloved; Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose; and Octavia Butler's Kindred. The result is a wide-ranging examination of orality in African American women's narratives of slavery—whether "as told to" narratives recorded by an amanuensis, narratives "written by herself," late-nineteenth-century domestic fiction, historical novels of slavery, or neoslave narratives—across some one hundred and thirty years of Black women's literary history.

Fulton's central assertion is that Black women's oral traditions are used to control representations of Black women; to amplify and expand written narratives; and to offer representations of slavery that are more complete and complex because they are "performance narratives" that exceed the limitations of "print-language descriptions" (pp. 6-7). It is this final assertion that I find most intriguing and would have liked Fulton's study to address. Since Speaking Power focuses on published narratives in a variety of genres, the "performance narratives" of which Fulton speaks—instances of Black feminist orality—reach us only through their recording or representation within a "print-language" text. This necessarily raises more complex and potentially problematic questions of representation for the early texts on which the study focuses than Fulton often acknowledges. The desire to locate and read instances of resistant Black feminist orality sometimes means the interests of those recording the narratives, and their necessary effects, go underexamined, as in the case of Louisa Picquet and Sojourner Truth, as does the complex positioning of texts within overlapping and competing reform movements, as in the case of Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by feminist-abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.

Fulton's study is at its strongest when it turns to contemporary texts by African American women. It is her final chapter on Morrison's Beloved, Williams's Dessa Rose, Butler's Kindred, and Gomez's The Gilda Stories that reads elements of African American oral traditions, "Black vernacular," and "musical practices" (p. 104) as they work to effect resistance and healing in these very different historical novels of slavery or neoslave narratives. Focusing on scatting, trickster tales, call and response, and the ring shout, Fulton offers original, compelling, and insightful readings of these central texts in the African American women's literary tradition. This chapter examines, in particular, what Fulton calls "the complex relationship between oral and written forms" (p. 122) to interesting effect, an undertaking that cannot be underestimated given that this relationship is central to understanding the African American literary tradition at large. That Fulton focuses on the writing of Black women and maps a tradition including little-known texts often disregarded in a field that traces Black women's literary inheritance from slave narratives to Hurston's...