ETHNIC AMERICA. Seminar outline

THE BLACK FEMALE AESTHETIC

Principal points of origination:
Post 1963 phase of Anglo feminism (Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique)
Black male aesthetic
Black female experience or the home

Black Female Aesthetic arises against the sexism of the black male aesthetes and the racism of the white feminists

Main form of expression: the blues

Central document: Combahee River Collective Statement
Leading spokeswomen: Barbara Smith, Alice Walker

Stereotypes of black females in American literature:
Mammy: named after Scarlett’s „Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1936)
Castrating Matriarch, undermining the black male’s manhood, Granny in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)

Main goal: to improve the acceptance of the black female writer, considers both the black male, white female dominant groups.
Fight against triple jeopardy, or the triple-bind of oppression: gender, race, and class based subordination.
Centrifugal against black male, white female aesthetic


THE BLACK MALE AESTHETIC CENTRIPETAL ASPECTS


Two min schools of thought within the Black Aesthetic:
Committed School: this is associated with the centrifugal aspects, it is also essentialist, and particularistic, writes for an exclusive black readership

Detached School: universalist, emphasizes the author, instead of the black author

Meanings of centripetality:
Rejection of withdrawal from American culture, or cultural disengagement
Cultural addition over cultural subtraction
Using stereotypical images of blacks to achieve artistic and political purposes (Purlie Victorious)
Using elements of mainstream American culture: Declaration of Independence, John Winthrop’s sermon: ”we shall be a city upon a hill”
Leroi Jones: Dutchman (1964) title of the drama refers to the myth of the Flying Dutchman,Snow White legend, Paradise Motif, references to Romeo and Juliet, using Albee’s Zoo Story (1958) as a model,


Main features of centripetality in the Black Aesthetic:

-By its very nature keeps Black culture within the primary core as it counterbalances the centrifugal forces
-uses synchretization that is the combination of various cultural impulses
-refuses to write for an exclusively black audience, or to produce from an exclusively black vantage point
-unlike the centrifugal impulse, it finds an audience, postulates a receiver on the other end of the cultural communication chain
-it does not condemn the committed school, it finds alternatives
-it uses the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house: A famous quote from feminist scholarship that can be applied here as well. It means that the authors use white or Euro-American generated stereotypes, such as the minstrel image in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1966)