Ladies, I hope you are feeling supported during this difficult time. I am in the middle of consulting with the Digital Humanities Center about the final assignment and plan to reach out to you soon (possibly late tonight [Sunday] regarding alternatives and possibilities for completing the semester.
I’ll share with you some of my challenges in handling this. I’m at somewhat of a loss here and don’t feel able to adjudicate individual situations. On a personal level, there is no one-size-fits-all response to community crisis. Some people find it difficult to concentrate in such a time; others find throwing themselves into a task or project to be a source of equilibrium. They are equally valid and not necessarily based on how close one is to heart of the loss. The other challenge is institutional: I feel like each of you at this point has clearly learned enough about Ntozake Shange and her “worlds” to do well. Most of you have felt your way through some of the archive. However, the course fulfills a “thinking digitally” foundations requirement and that is (mostly) made manifest in the final Scalar project. I can give you blanket extensions, but some of you also need some closure for this semester.
These are what I am thinking through and will get back to you!
I really enjoyed my presentation from last week primarily focusing on Black Macho and the Myth of the Black Superwoman by Michele Wallace. The themes that came up in this particular reading were issues that I’ve been researching and noticing for a while now. The thing that struck me the most was that the tension and the hostility between black men and women stems from 50 years ago during the civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement for many black people was supposed to be seen as solidarity between black men and black women trying to fight one cause, white supremacy. However, there were underlying issues such as the erasure of black womens’ importance in the movement. The main thing that I was especially fascinated about was black mens’ sudden preference for white women and their hate for black women. Due to the patriarchal norms of the 1950s, it seemed like the downplaying of black women’s role in the civil rights movement was also normalized into American society. The most interesting part was that many of the black men in the civil rights movement began dating white women that participated in the movement. Wallace made sure to delve deeper into the history of why black men began pursuing white women. Because black men were emasculated during slavery and reconstruction, they felt that it was an accomplishment or an achievement to have à white woman on their arm. This made him feel more like a man. I already knew the perfect video that would fit this situation, the Iyanla Fix My Life episode from three years ago that was supposed to help dispel the stereotype of the “angry black woman”. Iyanla Vanzant set the stage for a difficult conversation and the black men in the video let their hate for black women be known. I was not expecting that the same reasons that the black men used in the video from 2016 were the same reasons that black men used in 1979. It is honestly disappointing that 40 years later, we hear the same baseless excuses.
However, it makes sense why the same stereotypes are still being displayed today. Even though we have made some progress as a nation from the 60s and 70s, we still have a long way to go. Many of the same harsh realities of racism and discrimination still persist today in 2019. Although the excuses and stereotypes that that black men in the Iyanla video made were baseless and problematic, we still see a link between the men of the 60s versus the men of 2016. Black men are still being emasculated but in different ways than they were in the past. Therefore, they continue to push the same stereotypes of black women to still find a way to feel more masculine. As problematic as their statements are, it is important to see that we as a people are still facing the same harsh realities of racism and discrimination.
Cast of 2019 production of for colored girls . . .at The Public
Hello all, Taylor showed us some wonderful ways to use Scalar, both in itself and along with other digital tools. Those who attended probably realized that you forget how to use tools if you don’t use the regularly! In that spirit, I encourage/invite those of you with blogposts left to do at least one of them on Scalar, try tagging and using the widgets. Although I realize that these will be experimental, if you are trying to be particularly bodacious, please feel free to put “this is an experiment” at the top.
One useful tip from Taylor: Think about combining analogue and digital content– perhaps use your own drawings, paintings or collages with annotations and other media.
Taylor shared her outline and the links from the session with us. You can find it here. I put at the bottom of that outline a spreadsheet for you to let us know what you are thinking about doing for your final project and a way to contact each other so that you might go to the DHC together or figure out problems. If you have problem accessing the spreadsheet, you can do it here.
Some of the Barnard staff involved with the #ShangeMagic project have asked how they can be part of discussions of Shange’s works given that they don’t have access to the classes, etc. and have limited time during the day. I’m hoping to compile a selection of some of Shange’s works for them to have (hopefully we will discuss them over a lunch during the spring). For copyright reasons, I don’t want to call it a Shange “reader,” but maybe it will be a “Shange mixtape” in photocopies. Read More
While host Ellis Haizlip introduces James Baldwin as “Mr. Baldwin,” he introduces Giovanni as “Nikki.” The dynamic between Baldwin and Giovanni is compelling. At times, when Baldwin calls Giovanni “baby, baby, baby,” and “my dear,” it comes across as approachable; at other times, it comes across as rather patronizing. (Affectionately, and perhaps wryly, she responds by calling him “Jimmy.”) He routinely interrupts and corrects her, blurring the line between his status as an elder and his status as a man.
At one point (51:00), while Giovanni struggles to get a word in about Black women and children’s experiences with domestic violence and lack of support from Black men, Baldwin puts his hand over hers, stopping her hand gestures, and says, “But wait, wait, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, baby.” He gives her hand a squeeze before gesturing towards himself. “Look,” he transitions, “I’ve had to learn in my own life…” Divested by racism of the social economic ability to provide for his family, Baldwin suggests, “I’m no longer in my own eyes – it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me – in my own eyes I’m not a man.” Giovanni does not budge, responding at once, “It does indeed make a difference what I think about it.”
Earlier, Giovanni has explained her position (48:11):
Let’s say a guy’s going with a girl. You’re going with Maybelle and Maybelle gets pregnant, and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybelle because you don’t have the money for a crib, right? Maybelle doesn’t need a crib. […] What Maybelle needs at that moment is a man. […] A man […] is not necessarily a provider of all that stuff. […] You don’t have a job. […] Maybelle understands there is no job. But what she needs is a man to come by and say, ‘Hey baby, you look good.’ And Black men refuse to function like that because they say, ‘I want to bring the crib when I come.’ You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself. […] I’m a poor woman. […] I’m already deprived of almost everything that we find in the world. Must I also be deprived of you?
Baldwin responds with a memorable quote (50:16): “You can blame him [the man] on a human level if you like, but I think it’s more interesting to try to – you have to understand it, the bag the cat is in.” His riff on the saying is powerful, but where do Black women fit in? Are Black women responsible for understanding both the social reality men have been stuffed into, and their own? Are men and women’s “bags” separate at all? And if there are two cats in one bag, can they not use their combined strength to discover the shape of their social reality together, to break out together? Why is it an inevitability for the bag to be external to the man, to overdetermine the man’s behavior, and yet an expectation for the woman to understand the bag and accommodate its harmful effects on people trapped inside? Why are women expected to perform unique epistemological labor to understand social realities affecting multiple genders?
The question of how Black men can better understand and support Black women’s struggle against oppression never comes up in Giovanni and Baldwin’s dialogue. I was reminded of Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”:
Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold onto, is you, is you, is you
This resonates with Giovanni’s insistence: “You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself.” Whereas Baldwin emphasizes a man’s dependence on the bag in which he has been trapped, and thus “the Black man’s” need to be seen as a man by white society’s standards, Giovanni focuses on “Maybelle’s” radical antimaterialist love for her man. He is already seen as a man by the woman right in front of him; if only he would value her perspective just as much as his own, she wouldn’t pay the price of his needing affirmation elsewhere. As Toni Morrison critiqued Ralph Ellison’sInvisible Man – “Invisible to whom?”
There is no unmediated relationship, Giovanni and Morrison suggest, between “the Black man” and a larger, uniformly white “society.” Relationships between Black people and their world are also shaped by families, communities, and workplaces in which Black women and Black men can and must support each other, across difference. A Black woman’s perspective is essential to establish this radical commons. Otherwise, Black women become, as Donna Kate Rushin has written so eloquently in Bridge Poem (1981), the bridge between Black men and white society. Who will build Black women’s healing connections to each other, and to themselves? As Audre Lorde challenges, “If society ascribes roles to black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?” (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 17).
Like Giovanni’s Maybelle, June Jordan uses the Scholar‘s conversation around sexism to advance an anticapitalist argument. “The point is not whether he earns a couple dollars more or less than she; the point is that, as a people, our ability to provide for ourselves is under […] white institutional attack,” Jordan stresses (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 40). Aspiring to gendered white economic ideals and competing for scraps will not fix this crisis; rather, solidarity and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” are in order. The ideal man for Giovanni’s Maybelle refuses to buy into the demands of racist capitalist materialism, for he does not measure his worth in dollars or property accumulation. He brings value to Maybelle’s life in himself, by offering to share emotional support and child care responsibilities, and by treating her with respect. He carries his own weight, and they are both freer for it.
I was fascinated to learn that, after the racist white feminist press Persephone dropped This Bridge, women of color feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde worked together to found their own radical feminist press by and for women of color, Kitchen Table, in 1980, with which they kept This Bridge in circulation (Adair and Nakamura, 261). This immediately reminded me of Carrie Mae Weems’s historic exhibition, her Kitchen Table photo series, in 1990. Both the feminist press and Weems’s photo series chose to center the kitchen table in projects that defended women of color’s and queer women’s access to intimate justice.
Members of the Kitchen Table Press. Source: Kitchen Table Literary Arts. https://www.kitchen-table.org/
For the radical feminist press, the name Kitchen Table immediately announces the editors’ commitment to prioritizing praxis over theory. There are many crucial contrasts with the racist white feminist title “Persephone” – a reference to an ancient Greek goddess and princess who, in a thinly veiled fruit allegory, disobeys injunctions against sex before marriage. “Persephone” appeals to the racist european cult of claiming ancient Greek and Roman slaveholding and colonizing societies as whitewashed cultural forebears to europe and the united states. The white feminist invocation of “Persephone” defines freedom in a very limited and individualistic sense: a princess’s desire to choose heterosexual partners without consequences.
In contrast, Kitchen Table locates freedom in direct action more than theory or myth, in the lives of ordinary women rather than the elite. Persephone is a fictional character; the Kitchen Table is a very real place. Kitchen Table recalls a linkage of necessity and creativity in the full dimensions of Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” that rejects heteronormativity, superficial pornographic consumerism, and freedom without accountability. Rather than representing the name of an individual woman, Kitchen Table names a space that has functioned at once as a home and a workplace for working women throughout history, a space within which women are, through the press, finally invited to define and name themselves.
Similarly, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems brilliantly subverts the anthropological gaze of the camera.[1] She acts as both object – that which is captured by the lens – and subject – the framer, editor, and namer of what can be seen. For Weems, the kitchen table does not symbolize political isolation; a lamp illuminates the kitchen table like a stage, or a factory floor. Largely a homosocial space shared by women, in which men feature only as visitors, never as fixtures, the kitchen table represents a political economic arena in its own right. Weems’s kitchen table is entangled with and helps shape the mainstream masculinist, white supremacist political landscape, rather than existing “outside” it.
The fact that the essential work Black women expend in kitchens is perennially unpaid and often required in addition to a full day’s work at a formal job risks refiguring racist and patriarchal exploitation. Weems’s Kitchen Table explores the contradictory potentialities of the kitchen: on the one hand, as a landmark of the ongoing, unredressed labor given by and seized from Black women; and on the other hand, as a radical commons out of which the liberatory possibilities of communities and the sustenance of generations can grow.
In Untitled (Eating lobster), a man at the head of the table hungrily sucks lobster, leaving shells behind. Weems’s food is untouched as she leans over to caress the man. Behind them, a bird sits in a looming cage. Maya Angelou wrote that the bird’s wings are clipped and her legs are tied. But Weems’s limbs are unchained and her kitchen has no bars. What bonds make her stay and pull her towards the man she feeds – force or love, pleasure or obligation, delight or debt? Can either/or questions help us understand her position?
The kitchen table as a social economic institution analyzed by Weems and Adair and Nakamura’s reflection on the Kitchen Table as a radical feminist press by and for women of color raise similar dilemmas. After recounting women’s struggles to gain access to books by women of color that were routinely abandoned out of print by racist mainstream publishers, Adair and Nakamura in “Digital Afterlives” give credit to online networks of radical free information sharing, while also pointing out troubling continuities with legal systems of exploitation. Spaces for “digital consciousness raising on Tumblr” serve as a
“feminist classroom[,] but one in which nobody – not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online – was compensated for providing [this] education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr. […] [Thus,] both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces” (Adair and Nakamura, 256).
For example, the Kitchen Table press survived in part by taking advantage of personal relationships with people – predominantly women of color – who were committed to the cause of circulating their radical message, which spared the press the cost of hiring paid staff to do the same work. Adair and Nakamura add hastily, “Of course, we do not equate these acts of solidarity with the exploits of racial capital” (262). Ultimately, however, “even ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical networks inevitably reproduce some racial and gendered dynamics of unremunerated work,” including work that is not counted or credited as work (263). Is the kitchen table a home or a workplace? A product of public labor or private love? An appliance serving at a woman’s convenience, or a domineering institution in whose framework her life plays out, like a cross-section of a dollhouse? If it is both, what does that tell us about freedom and the work of getting free?
we write letters to each other / incessantly / across a kitchen table / third wrld feminist strategy / is plotted.
we tlk long hours / into the night / it is when this midnight oil is burning /inthoseafterhours / that we secretly reclaim our goddesses / and our female-identified / cultural tradition
“i got myself home, / lit me some candles / … / put on sum
dinah and / aretha” (rushin)
In “Between the Lines: On Culture, Class, and Homophobia” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga describes the limitations of a strictly racialized reading of a woman’s experience. In this passage, Moraga describes the act of turning towards each other for “strength and sustenance” (102) as we search for our desire to have “all [our] sisters of color actively identified and involved as feminists” (102). Adopting Shange’s poetic style of writing, I chose this passage to emphasize the act of coming together through mediums of letters, music, or the spoken word. By deconstructing the original structure, including the quote by Rushin, I can now read Moraga and Rushin’s writing in the way it makes me feel; the words now dance and move and pause in a way that expresses a collectiveness, a warmth inherent in what we desire “third wrld feminist strategy” to be. It is “to write letters / to tlk long hours / put on sum dinah and / aretha” that we move past fractured images of the self, where our “whole” identities can meld into a single movement that acknowledges and is fueled by this “midnight oil,” this difference, that is learned through these mediums.
Cup coasters I found in the Shange Archives. I reflected on each word on every coaster and realized their relationship to Shange’s work.
I found these cup coasters in the Ntozake Shange Archives. The box I found them in said that they were found in Shange’s home when her belongings were collected. As soon as I saw them, many thoughts ran through my mind. The words on the coasters read: consciousness, nonviolence, homeland, realization, environment, women, the journey, values, fulfillment, obstacles, hope, and freedom.
Each word is a theme that is shown in a plethora of her works and pieces. Perhaps she used these coasters as her inspiration when she wrote? The coasters were, in fact, found laying around her house. Maybe she used a different coaster for each piece she wrote and tried to work that word/theme into it?
These coasters make me think about each word and how every word is a significant and powerful theme that is ever-present in Shange’s pieces. The more obvious themes, to me, are the words that are almost self-explanatory: environment, women, the journey, values, fulfillment, obstacles, hope, and freedom.
For example, let’s look at “consciousness, “realization,” and “homeland.” Consciousness and realization can be interpreted as “awareness” — awareness/realization of one’s self, awareness/realization of one’s body, awareness/realization of one’s surroundings, and awareness/realization of one’s capabilities– something that Shange often explores in pieces like Nappy Edges and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
“Homeland” reminds me of Shange’s appreciation for black culture and tradition. A powerful underlying theme of Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, and in many of her pieces in Lost in Language in Sound, is the significance of cultural tradition in the lives of contemporary black people. For example, my previous blogpost that talked about how Shange makes it evident that the portrayal and depiction of cultural heritage strongly affects the identity and character development of Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, partly because of their mother’s influence. As I continue to reflect on the words on these coasters, I will think of deeper meanings and ways these themes connect to Shange’s life, as well as my life, going forward in the semester.
On page 25 of Beins and Enzsner’s of “Inter- and Transnational Feminist Theory and Practice in Triple Jeopardy and Conditions” they channel Chandra Mohanty’s thought processes. They write, “internationalism is also associated with naïve and counterproductive objectives of global sisterhood in which some universal commonality (usually oppression by the patriarchy) is presumed to unite women throughout the world.” I think it is important that they noted how transnationalism recognizes how people across the world may share common oppressions, such as the exploitation of their labor or domestic violence, without presuming that the manifestation of these oppressions is the same.
I am reminded of the notion of intersectional feminism and how it closely investigates the overlapping systems of discrimination and sexism that women face based on factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Intersectionality is crucial in order to understand how multiple oppressions interact to transform people’s lives and identities. With this being said, I feel that it’s important to note that women of color feminism and queer of color critique emerged out of the contradictions of racialized communities, which instead of being monolithic or united, is rather always already differentiated.
Just like Audre Lorde said in “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” one must recognize the fact that difference must be reconceptualized from a problem (something to fear, avoid or suppress) into a “springboard for creative change” (115). Women of color feminism and queer of color critique offer methodologies for understanding racialized communities as always constituted by a variety of racial, gendered, sexualized, and national differences. These intellectual traditions highlight the importance of an analysis that centers the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and thereby establishes a methodology for understanding coalition as emerging out of this difference. In conclusion, Beins and Enzsner’s discussion about transnationalism, along with women of color feminism and queer of color critique, is crucial for exploring and studying oppressions of various groups of individuals.
My beautiful mother who always encouraged me from a young age to embrace my unique identity and helped me get through bullying, harassment, and discrimination because of my mixed identity.
My mother, an immigrant who arrived to the US from the other side of the world with her sisters, is also a proud feminist and worked hard her entire life so I could attend Barnard to receive a wonderful education surrounded by intelligent women. I am so grateful to her for raising me the way she did.
As I was reading Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, I noticed that a powerful underlying theme of this piece is the significance of cultural tradition in the lives of contemporary black people, especially during the 1970s when this piece was written. In the piece, Shange makes it evident that the portrayal and depiction of cultural heritage strongly affects the identity and character development of Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, partly because of their mother’s influence.
The mother, Hilda, was a weaver, who instilled values in her daughters to absorb the creativity and discipline of a life in craft which then results in their pursuit of their own individualized arts and passions. While all three daughters were creative– with Indigo cooking and Cypress dancing–Sassafrass is the one who continues her family’s traditional occupation of weaving. I want to focus on Sassafrass in this blog post because to me, she represented cultural tradition.
Even though Sassafrass viewed weaving was an art form, rather than an occupation like her mother, she recognizes that she has a place in a line of weavers and then associates this skill with female identity on the widespread cultural scale. This is evident when Shange writes: “Sassafras was certain of the necessity of her skill for the well-being of women everywhere, as well as for her own. As she passed the shuttle through the claret cotton warp, Sassafrass conjured images of women weaving from all time and all places….”
This quote from Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo displays this theme of the importance of culture and tradition that doesn’t seem to escape Sassafrass’ mind. This quote almost makes it seem as if Sassafrass is realizing her calling to this art form/occupation that holds such a great deal of significance to her mother by acknowledging the importance of weavers and other female weavers everywhere.
My grandmother on Mother’s Day in 2016.
One of the cultural traditions in my family is learning to cook traditional Filipino dishes with my grandmother. Here are some of the materials we use and some of my mother’s homemade lumpia (Filipino eggrolls).
