Then and Now: Women of Color Originalism and the Anthological Impulse in Women's and Gender Studies

Abstract:We analyze This Bridge Called My Back and Some of Us Are Brave as anthologies, and emphasize the fact of the anthology as a key vehicle for producing "women of color" (WOC) as a legible and coherent category. Indeed, even as both anthologies refuse the notion of WOC as a coherent category, they now circulate in women's studies as texts that, in and of themselves, stand in for "women of color." Offering intellectual conversation in the form of a book, treating the anthology as the performance of "bridging" that can, as Toni Cade Bambara noted, "coax us into the habit of listening to each other and learning each other's ways of seeing and being" (vii), these anthologies have puzzlingly circulated as literal commodities of difference, standing in for difference rather than interrogating it (and for Some of Us, frequently only as an idea of its title itself). We argue that the circulation of these texts as WOC texts is particular of the current moment in the genesis of the field's ongoing institutionalization, retaining defensive postures even while institutionalization has disappeared the work that came in between then--these two anthologies-- and now, in the critical moment where Blackness is coming to stand in for all difference, and intersectionality as the institutional cure for women's studies and the intellectual property of Black feminism.