Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow
Autor Mollie Godfreyen Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 apr 2025
In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation. Through these narratives, they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations of Black feminists. By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, Godfrey also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationships between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259429
ISBN-10: 0814259421
Pagini: 232
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259421
Pagini: 232
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Godfrey recasts histories of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and—crucially—the midcentury as much more integrally feminist than previously acknowledged and positions the writers of these earlier generations as a missing link in a longer trajectory of Black subjectivity and its aesthetic representations.” —John K. Young, author of The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism
“Who said close reading is dead? Godfrey’s deft attention to the diverse novels and cultural histories of the likes of Hopkins, Larsen, Hurston, and Petry is thorough and compelling, and her many analytical threads connect back to ongoing conversations about Black women’s writing.” —Howard Rambsy II, author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers
Notă biografică
Mollie Godfrey is Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the editor of Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry and Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow.
Extras
Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow aims to unpack Black women writers’ long-silenced reimagining of the human in the years that preceded the academic emergence of Black feminist theory. Since the postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, it has become commonplace to critique humanism for its false universalism, anthropocentrism, and ahistoricism. Brave Humanism argues, however, that long before the well-known critiques of Western humanism that emerged in the post–civil rights era, and long before the embrace of humanistic language became visible again in the slogans of the Black Lives Matter movement, a similar set of critiques and embraces were being made by an earlier generation of Black women, the very people most excluded by the logic of Western humanism and most committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on different terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—the capacity of narrative forms to place human identities in particular sociohistorical contexts offered a direct challenge to the white supremacist and patriarchal logics that underwrote de jure segregation, beginning with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 and ending with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Scholars are now shifting the lexicon for the de jure segregation era from Jim Crow to Jane Crow, civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s term to describe the early- to mid-twentieth-century “framework of ‘male supremacy’” she recognized as living alongside the legal system of “‘white supremacy.’” Brave Humanism shows that the Black women writers who were enmeshed in these frameworks were also engaged in imaginative projects of critique and creation: they exposed the white supremacist and patriarchal logic of Western humanism as it evolved over the decades to support these frameworks, and they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations.
In turning to the decades that separate Anna Julia Cooper from later Black feminists, this book unpacks the historically undervalued efforts of Jane Crow–era Black women writers to dismantle the exclusionary frameworks through which their own creative efforts were often judged. Reading these writers’ creative work in the context of the shifting production and reception pressures of the segregation era, I argue that the frameworks by which Black women’s writing was judged were themselves fictions, propped up by dominant narratives about race, gender, and the human. Much like the colorblind racism of the post–civil rights era, the putatively humanist frameworks of the segregation era were attractive to white America precisely because they held out the superficial promise of racial equality while forever precluding its arrival, which it did by questioning Black people’s alignment with white-defined Western humanist “norms.” Over the course of the Jane Crow era, these shifting frameworks violently shaped the critical assumptions with which Black women writers were forced to engage, from Pauline Hopkins’s confrontation with legal and biological accounts of race and gender in the 1890s to Nella Larsen’s entanglement with modernist claims about artistic originality and authenticity in the 1920s; from Zora Neale Hurston’s rewriting of anthropological depictions of the folk in the 1930s to Ann Petry’s rejoinder to sentimental and sociological accounts of race and gender in the 1940s; and from Gwendolyn Brooks’s resistance to Cold War–era investments in the “universal man” in the 1950s to Lorraine Hansberry’s refusal of liberal caricatures of Black radicalism in the 1960s. Though the Black women writers under study here had varied responses to these shifting but always exclusionary humanist frameworks, their work is united in insisting that an emancipatory conception of the human must be theorized through—rather than in opposition to—the lived experience of Black women.
By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, this book also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationship between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. Many scholars look to Black literature for signs of agency, self-determination, and resistance, but others see within these humanistic concepts the ongoing operation of violence, exclusion, and subjection. Some scholars have turned to Black feminist postcolonial writers for a way past this analytic impasse. I chart a prehistory of that critical turn, focusing on how Black women writing before the 1960s and ’70s used their creative work to expose their exclusion from Western humanism while also retheorizing the human in and through their own image. Their work both supports recent efforts to reclaim antiracist and antisexist formulations of the human as a foundation for Black people’s liberation and reinvigorates our understanding of the political stakes of segregation-era Black women’s writing. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.
In turning to the decades that separate Anna Julia Cooper from later Black feminists, this book unpacks the historically undervalued efforts of Jane Crow–era Black women writers to dismantle the exclusionary frameworks through which their own creative efforts were often judged. Reading these writers’ creative work in the context of the shifting production and reception pressures of the segregation era, I argue that the frameworks by which Black women’s writing was judged were themselves fictions, propped up by dominant narratives about race, gender, and the human. Much like the colorblind racism of the post–civil rights era, the putatively humanist frameworks of the segregation era were attractive to white America precisely because they held out the superficial promise of racial equality while forever precluding its arrival, which it did by questioning Black people’s alignment with white-defined Western humanist “norms.” Over the course of the Jane Crow era, these shifting frameworks violently shaped the critical assumptions with which Black women writers were forced to engage, from Pauline Hopkins’s confrontation with legal and biological accounts of race and gender in the 1890s to Nella Larsen’s entanglement with modernist claims about artistic originality and authenticity in the 1920s; from Zora Neale Hurston’s rewriting of anthropological depictions of the folk in the 1930s to Ann Petry’s rejoinder to sentimental and sociological accounts of race and gender in the 1940s; and from Gwendolyn Brooks’s resistance to Cold War–era investments in the “universal man” in the 1950s to Lorraine Hansberry’s refusal of liberal caricatures of Black radicalism in the 1960s. Though the Black women writers under study here had varied responses to these shifting but always exclusionary humanist frameworks, their work is united in insisting that an emancipatory conception of the human must be theorized through—rather than in opposition to—the lived experience of Black women.
By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, this book also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationship between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. Many scholars look to Black literature for signs of agency, self-determination, and resistance, but others see within these humanistic concepts the ongoing operation of violence, exclusion, and subjection. Some scholars have turned to Black feminist postcolonial writers for a way past this analytic impasse. I chart a prehistory of that critical turn, focusing on how Black women writing before the 1960s and ’70s used their creative work to expose their exclusion from Western humanism while also retheorizing the human in and through their own image. Their work both supports recent efforts to reclaim antiracist and antisexist formulations of the human as a foundation for Black people’s liberation and reinvigorates our understanding of the political stakes of segregation-era Black women’s writing. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.
Cuprins
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Brave Humanism of Black Women Writers Chapter 1 Of One Blood: Blood Brotherhood in the Black Woman’s Era Chapter 2 No Sanctuary: Plagiarism, Primitivism, and the Politics of Recognition Chapter 3 Folk in the Flesh: Insides, Outsides, and the Object of Anthropology Chapter 4 Networks of Care: Sentiment, Sociology, and the Protest Fiction Debate Chapter 5 Renaissance Women: Vision and Vulnerability in the Black Chicago Renaissance Coda Bravery and the Backlash: Lorraine Hansberry at the Forum Bibliography Index
Descriere
Recovers Jane Crow–era Black women’s writing as a challenge to the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation.