Crafting a race women's aesthetic tradition: literary experimentation in Black club women's newspapers and its visual cultural legacy
Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Late nineteenth-century and early African American women activists engaged in literary and visual experiments as a tradition of crafting aesthetics to imagine new possibilities for Black womanhood while they conducted public political action. The archives of their organizing efforts evince these Black women activists’ practice of blending and transforming existing genres of journalistic documentation and innovative literary and visual art, which this project offers a method for reading anew. The groundbreaking methods and theories of Black literary scholars Pier Gabrielle Foreman, Elizabeth McHenry, and Brittney Cooper inform this project’s approach to charting literary activism and aesthetic tradition. This genealogy begins with Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as founding foremothers of this tradition and the Black club movement, then turns to read creative writings embedded in the newspaper columns of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Mary Church Terrell in the club movement’s organ, the Woman’s Era. Their aesthetic remixed generic conventions to allow the simultextual reading of their works as creative expressions of their interior lives, treatise theorizing Black womanhood and sociality, cultural criticism, and grassroots organizing. ☐ This project takes up the visual turn in activist newspapers via the proliferation of portraiture in the Woman’s Era and photographs in The Aframerican Woman’s Journal, the organ of the National Council of Negro Women. My methods for reading these image-rich texts build on those modeled by photography and visual culture scholars Treva Lindsey, Kellie Morgan, and Shawn Michelle Smith. The juxtaposition of race women’s writing with a growing photographic archive intervened in the visual field’s epistemological dominance in defining Black womanhood and imagining its future. These self-representational images can be read as both visual affirmations of Black elite social norms and values advanced by racial uplift ideology and examples of the diverse attitudes, personalities, and internal tensions that animated the club movement. ☐ Black women activists’ aesthetic choices created space to reflect on their affective labor, personal experiences, and conflicted feelings toward the project of racial uplift and political organizing from institutional margins. Expressing the tensions between their interior and public lives constituted a collective probing of the limits of their performances as representatives of the race to advance early Black feminist politics and praxis. Ultimately, the race woman’s aesthetic tradition prompts scholars to revisit texts in the early Black women’s literary canon and remap the networks race women engaged as writers. Moreover, the tradition reveals a genealogy of Black feminist visuality that begins with race women writers and extends to Black women sculptors such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller from the New Negro Era and Simone Leigh today. Centering race women as the subjects and agents of a Black aesthetic tradition carried on by contemporary diasporic artists invites scholars to explore new directions in interdisciplinary studies across literature, photography, visual art, and activist archives.
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Keywords
Black feminist politics, Clubwomen, Newspapers, Race woman, Visual culture