1. Sisters in the struggle: Women writers in Africa and the diaspora
Week 8
Sisters in the struggle: Women writers in Africa and the diaspora

2. Key Issues What have we lost in stifling female creativity?
What do we gain, by studying women writers as well as men?
What has been the role of the sexual and psychological oppression of women in their writing?
How should we understand the ‘evasion and invention’ of the autobiographies of people like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, etc?
Did Hurston ‘sell out her race’ to a white audience? Should Hurston be praised as a boundary breaking black female writer, or chided for her political conservatism and her pandering to white perceptions of poor, uneducated African Americans?

3. Outline Why is a separate session needed to focus on women writers?
Radical Women:
Sojourner Truth
Ida B. Wells
Claudia Jones
Rewriting the course: female writing as a different construction of the diasporic tradition?
Alice Walker’s interpretation of Phyllis Wheatley (1773) Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral
Slave narratives
Miscegenation (Frances Harper, Iola Leroy (1892); Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood (1903))

4. Why have women had a minimal voice in this narrative?
Privileging of literacy to African men
Bill Schwarz, West Indian intellectual tradition marked by ‘masculine imperative’
Men’s political and geographical mobility, especially in terms of international travel
Examples of Du Bois and Sol Plaatje did not have female counterparts.
Silencing of women (misogyny of Sophiatown writers
Importance of female domesticity in ideology of ‘racial uplift’.
Sublimation of women’s equality in struggle for racial equality.
Higher education in Africa, the UK and America, first rise of Black Studies and African Studies, need to legitimate a literary ‘tradition’
Emphasis on ‘intellectual’ literature rather than ‘popular’ literature.

5. Sojourner Truth, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ (1851)
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

6. Ida B. Wells ( )
“The Afro-American is not a bestial race”: Radical anti-lynching activist
Challenging ‘civility’ – lynching as barbarism
Sources: Tony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale
Tony Bogues:
‘If the slave narratives in their literary form were badges of reason, then Wells-Barnett’s writings were polemical sociological excursions. At the level of representation, they were constructed to demonstrate truth, to deconstruct some of the deepest racist arguments of the period, and in the end, to mobilize a reform movement against the ritual burning of the black body – known as lynching.’

7. Claudia Jones: ‘A woman left of Marx’ (1915-1964)
The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced...
As mother, as Negro, and as worker, the Negro woman fights against the wiping out of the Negro family, against the Jim Crow ghetto existence which destroys the health, morale, and very life of millions of her sisters, brothers, and children.
Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.

8. Rewriting the course: female writing as a different construction of the diasporic tradition?
Alice Walker’s interpretation of Phyllis Wheatley (1773) Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral
Slave narratives
‘emphasis on death as preferred option to servitude. Ex. Margaret Garner, immortalized in Morrison’s Beloved.
Slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs (1861) and of Mary Prince (1831) as providing an alternative discourse?
Pauline Hopkins
No one will do this for us, we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history’