African American women and feminism: Alice Walker's womanism ...

12 Marta Mazurek
ginalization of people of color by the dominant theoretical discourse; on the
other hand, it is claiming recognition for African American women’s thought as
a legitimate source and form of knowledge. More particularly, Christian’s assertion
voiced criticism of globalizing gestures of feminist thought which insisted on the
unified identity of “woman”, basing the construction of this category on shared
experience of gender oppression instead of recognizing multiple cultural, social
and political intersections which define women’s experience.
Christian’s “controversial essay” 10 can be understood as a gesture of separation
from and rejection of the academic theoretical discourse of the 1980s,
as well as a call for opening up space for reconceptualizing Eurocentric epistemologies
and revealing new ways of knowledge which would allow African
American women to define their own experience. By stating that Black women’s
theorizing “is often in narrative forms, in the stories [they] create, in riddles
and proverbs, in the play with language [...] celebrated in the works of writers
such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker” 11 , Christian postulates what might be
called a risky reversal of the theory/creative writing opposition. By repeating
the gesture of postmodern philosophers who abolish the opposition between
theoretical and literary texts, she invites African American women critics to
treat creative writing as theory.
Despite the fact that Deborah E. McDowell critiques Christian’s reversal of
“theory/creative [writing] binarism in order to claim for the literatures of ‘people
of color’ status as ‘theory’” as still giving “primacy to ‘theory’” 12 , the latter’s proposal
might be understood as a shift toward embracing Afrocentric feminist epistemology
in analyzing African American women’s literary output (also postulated by
Barbara Smith over a decade earlier). Such a traditional Afrocentric understanding
of the connections of knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment
focuses on “Black women as agents of knowledge”, that is it concentrates
on such women as “blues singers, poets, autobiographers, story tellers, and orators
validated by everyday Black women as experts on a Black women’s standpoint” 13 .
Consequently, African American women’s thought, which represents – to use the
Foucauldian term – subjugated knowledge as well as their long-standing culture
of resistance to the situation of oppression, forms what Donna Haraway labeled
situated knowledge, challenging the superiority and truth claims of Eurocentric
and masculinists disembodied and detached observation in favor of understanding
that is partial, embodied and located in a specific context.
10
D. E. McDowell: The “Practice” of “Theory”. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W.
Napier. New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, p. 575.
11
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 281.
12
D. E. McDowell: The “Practice” of “Theory”, op.cit., p. 579.
13
P. H. Collins: Black Feminist Thought. New York & London: Routledge, 1990, p. 230, 231.