On Foremothers, Muses, and Black Feminist Theorizing

Abstract

There are some things I am unapologetic about. One of those things is my disinterest in framing my academic work with the theories of dead white men. As a scholar of Black cultural studies, I am often perplexed by the logic that theories born out of spaces and epistemes that have contributed to Black oppression could be useful for my efforts to investigate and analyze ways Black people negotiate that oppression. I approach this work recognizing Black people as active agents, so I think it only appropriate to privilege the ways in which we ourselves do this work, often as both metaphorical and literal efforts to save our lives. Thus, when teaching Black cultural studies courses, I have no qualms telling graduate students, “There is nothing Derrida or Foucault can tell me that Morrison does not do better.” Elaborating, I explain that for the type of research I do, the creative and intellectual oeuvre of Toni Morrison, for example, is amazingly rich and far more relevant to the global Black experience than the theorizing done by most dead and living white men. This of course does not mean I frown upon being familiar with the scholarship of dead (or living) white men, but I do not privilege it when doing critical Black studies, as I find the impetus and essence of whitewashed critical theory to often be counterintuitive and to fall short when theorizing the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. I embrace Barbara Christian’s enduring 1987 interrogative: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?’” (77). I know who I do it for; I do it for people who look like me and move through the world being judged for looking like me. This essay considers the theoretical function of Morrison’s creative work as a method for studying Black cultural texts that are steeped in a Black feminist tradition that Morrison both inherited and passed on. As both a cultural producer working across multiple genres and one of the most astute cultural critics, Morrison is a force to be reckoned with, but she is not an anomaly. She is situated within a continuum of Black feminist cultural theorizing that, through the disruption of hegemonic epistemologies, interrupts whitewashed discourse that triggers eruptions of alternative ways of knowing and being in Black women’s cultural productions. In this essay,