Staking Claims: Theorizing Female Agency and Empowerment Through Black Women’s Literary Writings

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

—Achebe, Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe’s words, above, on the efficacy of using a variety of perspectives in examining a given phenomenon, provide a suitable point of entry into the two works under review. Both are serious scholarly interventions in the discourse of social justice in relation to black women. Both present vigorous arguments for positive theoretical constructions of black women’s lives that push against prevailing social and intellectual structures and values, and both recognize the power of black women’s literary writings as sites of theorizing black (female) existence. However, each author provides a different critical perspective of contemporary black women’s subjectivity and agency. Also, each work offers a distinct theoretical approach to Black women’s writing, and by doing so increases our scope of interpreting black women’s literary writings. These works are thus admirable epistemic space-claiming ventures despite the shortcomings they exhibit.

It is often difficult to evaluate a sequel independent of the work upon which it builds, and Hudson-Weems’s Africana Womanist Literary Theory is no exception. Without a doubt the principal merit of this work is not its originality of thought but its space-claiming mission. Africana Womanist Literary Theory brings the author’s cultural theoretical model of Africana womanism squarely into the literary critical discursive domain. Africana womanism, which boldly theorizes black women’s existence across nations and cultures, was initially articulated in book-length form in Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. The first six chapters of Africana Womanist Literary Theory in essence (re)present this conceptual model. In these chapters Hudson-Weems borrows liberally from the initial work, sometimes using very lengthy pieces, such as an excerpt from Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves that constitutes the whole of chapter eight of Africana Womanist Literary Theory. In fact, although I view Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves as a more cogent presentation of Hudson-Weems’s model, I do not believe readers unfamiliar with this initial work would miss much in terms of Hudson-Weems’s critical views as these views are repeated, sometimes verbatim, in the later work under review.

Hudson-Weems’s concept of Africana womanism is firmly rooted in Afrocentric ideology and therefore draws from the strength of this ideology in rejecting the marginalization of black people in Western episteme and in promoting a mode of thinking and living that unapologetically challenges Western hegemony, particularly in cultural and intellectual contexts. The concept of Africana womanism is Hudson-Weems’s attempt to create a conceptual empancipatory space in which, as she sees it, black women can themselves theorize their own existence, affirm their racial identity, and view their agency and empowerment in terms of embracing and centering traditional “authentic” African values. This theoretical space is necessary, according to Hudson-Weems, because feminism, under any nomenclature, cannot serve the purpose of black women. In her view, feminism as a mode of thinking “named and defined by women of European descent” (34) adheres to Western values and attitudes; it also promotes the agenda of white women, which, on the basis of differences of experiences, differ from those of black women. She therefore proposes that Black women create their own name, and define themselves and their critical perspectives and agenda in ways that reflect their particular experiences and African culture. This imperative informs the defining features of her concept as is evident in the following quotation:

While initiating a call for proper naming, I also insisted on our own agenda and our particular priorities of race, class, and gender contrary to the feminists’ female-centered agenda with female empowerment as their number one priority. The other...