SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

etween the two World Wars. Dawahare writes, “While nationalism proper . . . is not a major
issue for most black writers in the interwar period, the desire to establish a black national identity
and culture that coexists, however tenuously, with an American identity and culture, is of crucial
importance” (xv) because “to be sure, nationalism has appeared to many as the best way to
defeat racism” (xvii). To reiterate, these same nationalist principles could apply to separatist
communities on a much smaller scale. For example, using a much smaller sense of scope, the
artists studied herein—no matter the kind of community that they are constructing—explore how
separatist group dynamics can help (or fail to help) an individual resist various forms of
oppression. Dawahare also refers to how the “collective memory” of nationalists is disseminated
through mythical narrative (5), which reinforces what other critics have said about origin myths.
Finally, Dawahare also helps justify projects that examine phenomena like nationalism and
separatism; he states that “Only by historicizing subjectivity can we demonstrate how our
racialized/nationalized selves are politically forced, as Richard Wright argues, and not simply the
result of an individual decision bearing little or no relationship to the dominant discourses and
institutions of power” (138, original emphasis). I posit that projects examining artistic
representations of these phenomena are equally important and have equal potential to reveal
truth.
Another work on Black Nationalism contributes heavily to my own conception of how
separatism might be generally defined and ways that it might work—Madhu Dubey’s Black
Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Like Gordon’s work, Dubey’s focuses
specifically on Black Nationalism; unlike Gordon’s purely historical approach, Dubey examines
how black women writers might fit in with Black Nationalism. 7 This critic’s discussion of how
Black Nationalism initially devalued black women also can be applied to my readings of the
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