"We Are Here": Race, Gender, and Spaces of "Common Ground" in the Works of John Edgar Wideman, bell hooks, and Jesmyn Ward

Abstract

Black-authored self-writing serves multiple liberating functions, according to historian John Blassingame. In a short commentary for Black Scholar in 1973, Blassingame asserts the vitality of the black autobiographical tradition as a primary form of protest and intervention through the constitution of selfauthored images of black people. It provides “therapeutic value” by establishing the shared experience of racism and resistance between the author and reader and by affirming the humanity and complexity of black lives (“Black” 7). Black selfwriting also affords writers opportunities to establish their professional literary reputations, strengthen their composition skills, and construct black literary traditions. In other words, black autobiography helps produce a literary space of cultural self-determination. In Blassingame’s view, cultural self-determination assumes a beneficial character because it indexes, to cite his terminology, a “realistic” (2) culture of “uplift” (6) and “progress” (8) as a counter to negative, dehumanizing schemas that white supremacy systematically produces. This discourse of positivity, uplift, and progress emerges from the yoking of spatiality and the production of autobiographical narrative. Autobiography simultaneously measures and maps a space of social progress and uplift even as it performs the task of producing social progress and uplift; it crafts a history that anticipates its act of creation. It weaves the present into the fabric of the past to construct black identity and community in a dialectical relationship with resistance to oppression. Blassingame’s discussion of the role of self-writing as a tool of cultural selfdetermination anticipates the concept of “placemaking” theorized in the 2016 findings of a group of interdisciplinary scholars. In Marcus Anthony Hunter et al.’s study of black Chicago communities, placemaking derives from the use of “creative practices” (32) that highlight and reflect the “agency, intent, and ......................................................................................................