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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Firs [1], Line —— -2.9 —— Norm PgEn [1], ⠕ CHAPTER 1 Something Other Than a Family Quarrel Morrison’s Review of the Masculine Toni Morrison’s delight in flouting traditional as well as fashionable bottoms and tops finds her denounced by some politically stylish scholars for not carrying their latest lines. In a 1971 article, which posits “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” she has already begun to close down this kind of criticism with her usual comically blunt opener: “Well, she’s suspicious of what she calls ‘Ladies’ Lib.’ It’s not just the question of color, but of the color of experience” (15). The essay explains that attempting to find consensus among African American women on any subject is a doomed prospect because they have consistently, and deliberately , defied classification. However, it also surmises that critiques of masculinity and support for feminist issues, viewed by many black women and men alike as a predominantly white “family quarrel,” remain even more elusive because relationships between black men and black women have been historically different from the majority of their white counterparts. Accused of designing female victims, castrating women, and messed-up men, Morrison retorts that black women have borne their crosses “extremely well” and “everybody knows, deep down, that black men were emasculated by white men, period. And that black women didn’t take any part in that” (Stepto 384). Thus, Morrison’s review of masculinity suggests that not only have black men successfully retained their special vitality in spite of white male resistance; their connections to black women have saved their lives. Because Morrison’s mantra intones Other as integral to Self identity, 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [2], Line —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [2], her vision of masculinity must be conjoined with her idea of the feminine. Her form of feminism aligns her with a tradition that refuses to exclude the masculine. Like Zora Neale Hurston, Morrison evaluates the position of the black woman in America as having been, since her beginning, “de mule uh de world,” a scapegoat for suppressed black male frustration and rage but nonetheless a stubborn workhorse liable to kick or bite upon provocation and seeming not to have become the “true slave” that white women discern in their history (14). Forced out of her “profound desolation ” to invent herself, this woman has combined being a responsible person with being female. As such she has come to feel morally superior to white women, and to their men, and free to confront her world, including her man, on her terms (“What the Black Woman Thinks” 63). Morrison’s is the “womanist” insight that relationships between African American men and African American women must be understood not only in terms of the intersections of gender and race but also with respect to their participation in a larger, historically racist culture.1 In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian extends this skepticism to include literary critics who rely on current theoretical “isms” to read texts written by black women because such theories have been constructed in almost every case without any reference to these texts. In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Morrison confesses her disappointment with the vocabulary used to describe her work because she dislikes finding her books praised or condemned when the conclusions are “based on criteria from other paradigms” (342). Nellie McKay distinguishes between black and white feminist literary traditions by the presence or absence of their creative ancestors. She observes that most white women writers claim to have invented the authority for their voices in an effort to break the silence of what Virginia Woolf called “Shakespeare’s sisters.” Contemporary black women writers , however, look to the examples of their grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters to continue a powerful artistic heritage that is not white and not male (McKay 399). Sapphires and Geraldines instead of Philomelas and Lavinias, African American women have traditionally participated in the community “signifyin(g).” Describing the women in her own family as the “culture-bearers...

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