Reappropriation as Contestation: Reconstructing Images of Black Women in Kate Rushin's The Black Back-Ups

Given the persistence of stereotypical portrayals of black women in the media, artistic representations, and the broader American culture, it is not surprising that contesting such representations remains a central feature of writings by African American authors in general and African American women writers in particular. In light of this enduring concern, one important question that also persists is how creative writers can productively engage with stereotypes in ways that effectively disavow flat and incomplete characterizations of black women, even as these writers embrace the shared features of the groups they represent and recognize the importance of markers of group identities. Speaking of the way creative writers in particular may be challenged to treat "minority" subjects, Carrie Tirado Bramen notes, "One of the most difficult challenges confronting writers, and particularly minority writers, is how to represent ethnic and racialized characters without resorting to stereotypes." Arguing for the usefulness of "identity tropes" in giving "an ethnic group a degree of cultural and textual visibility," Bramen also acknowledges the danger of easily slipping into what she terms "tiresome predictability," further showing how realistic portrayals provide only partial protection "from accusations of stereotyping" (124).

This engagement with stereotypes is a defining feature of Kate Rushin's poetic oeuvre. One of the most gifted present-day US poets, Rushin has been writing and publishing poetry since the 1980s. A contemporary of black female poets such as Ntozake Shange and Rita Dove, Rushin, like these other two writers, continues the stylistic and thematic legacies of earlier poets such as Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde. Her work has been widely anthologized in Callaloo, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and other publications. The Black Back-Ups (1993), Rushin's first published collection, foregrounds black female subjects and features poems that span a wide gamut of female experiences and relationships, including women's interactions with and responses to family, church, work, neighborhood, and the wider US and world communities, contexts in which black women's agency and complexity are central. The collection includes poems addressing a diverse range of female experiences and perspectives, including those of the domestic worker, the "manly" female, and the woman who acts on her desire to travel; it comprises lyric poems, long narrative poems, and a number of short prose poems. The Black Back-Ups opens with an untitled vignette that begins "When I came home," includes multiple short pieces—interspersed between longer titled poems—and ends with the vignette, "The old woman with the ramrod back." Infused with a musicality that has historically shaped black expressive traditions, these poems also instantiate the profound influence of African American oral tradition.

Rushin's poems illustrate that one of the most useful approaches to contesting stereotypes is to reclaim them, thereby potentially minimizing negative associations and peeling away their power to marginalize the black female agents whom they have historically sought to obscure. The Black Back-Ups advances this conversation with its subversive representations of black women: the poems reframe, rather than simply reject, stereotypes. This essay addresses Rushin's treatment of stereotypical portrayals of black women by arguing for "a poetics of reappropriation," which is Rushin's definitive artistic response to stereotypes. By confronting and recuperating stereotypes in positive ways, Rushin walks the "fine line" (Bramen 124) that Bramen and others have addressed in a way that eschews both clichéd portrayals of black women and outright rejection of types and roles. Rushin claims and, in some instances, celebrates a multiplicity of characterizations even as she challenges the demeaning intentions and effects of many renditions of black womanhood. Furthermore, the fact that these poems are shaped by distinctly black performance traditions—particularly music and storytelling—buttresses their general embrace of Blackness and ways of being. At the same time, Rushin engages other expressive forms through her stylistic and thematic allusions to other genres, such as the epic.

I use the term reappropriate here in the way that it is currently used in several scholarly fields to refer to reclaiming negative characterizations and redefining...