Week8 midterm packet

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtbs20

The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research

ISSN: 0006-4246 (Print) 2162-5387 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20

African-American Studies: Legacies & Challenges: “What Would Black Studies Be If We'd Listened to Toni Cade?”

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

To cite this article: Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2005) African-American Studies: Legacies & Challenges: “What Would Black Studies Be If We'd Listened to Toni Cade?”, The Black Scholar, 35:2, 22-24, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2005.11413308

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2005.11413308

Published online: 14 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 22

View related articles

African-American Studies: Legacies & Challenges: "What Would Black Studies

Be If We'd Listened to Toni Cade?"

I wonder what it would take to fully integrate gender and sexuality into Black political consciousness. lVhat would it take for our public intellectuals, the self appointed spokespersons, the opinion leaders and the like to go beyond lip service given to "unity" and "common interest" to articulate a political sensibility that embraces substantive equality as a value within our community.

- Kimberle Crenshaw in Black Men on Gender, Race and Sexuality, edited by Devon Carbado, 1999

A S A GRADUATE STUDENT at Emory U niversi-ty in the late 1970s, I began my formal training in both African-American Studies and Women's Studies and embarked upon a jour- ney which continues to define my research and teaching--gendering Mrican-American intel- lectual history and articulating persistent femi- nist impulses among black women and men from slavery to the present. While much of this work has focused on the US, increasingly I have been exploring feminist politics within a more global context, particularly in Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil. My work, and the work of other scholars that falls under the rubric of black feminist studies, has been an important intervention in what can be labeled hegemon- ic Black Studies, whose conceptual frameworks have been shaped by masculinist imperatives and heterosexist paradigms that have failed to capture the complexities of black experience here and around the globe.

I T IS INSTRUCTIVE to consider the gendered aspects of the early history of Black Stud- ies, which has heretofore been invisible to scholars. This "herstory" of the development of the field concerns itself with a little known

Page 22

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

organization, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, which emerged as a result of the racial uplift impulses and international educational projects of the black women's club movement in the US. Organized by several prominent club women in 1924, most notably Margaret Murray Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Women's Club in Alabama, the Council's first president, and a member of the Tuskegee faculty, its purpose was to study the history of peoples of color throughout the world, particularly West Mrica, India, Haiti, and Cuba, and to disseminate knowledge about them for the purpose of engendering racial pride. Study groups, which were called Committees of Seven, were also formed to infuse public school curricula with material on blacks and other people of color.

It can now be argued that these curriculum development efforts were certainly a precursor to Black Studies. Field trips were also orga- nized to gain first-hand experience of other cultures. The Council also studied the situa- tion of women and children of color transna- tionally. Like Anna Julia Cooper, who men- tioned Muslim harems and the Chinese practice of foot-binding on the first page of her pioneering 1892 text, A Voice from the South, Council members were aware of the global realities of women. Margaret Murray Washing- ton taught a course at Tuskegee on the condi- tion and status of women throughout the world that clearly illustrated black women's awareness of the importance of gender long before there was a women's studies movement within the mainstream academy. If black schol- ars had followed the model of Margaret M. Washington and the Council, they would have understood the importance of a gendered approach to understanding the experiences of people of color.

THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 35, NO. 2

BLACK FEMINIST STUDIES, a corrective for traditional Black Studies, probes the silences, erasures, and complexities sur- rounding the experiences of peoples of Mrican descent wherever they live. The early scholarship was comparable to the painstak- ing excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. Black feminist literary critics made visible a rich, though mostly invisible tradition of black women writers going back to the nineteenth century. These scholars disrupted a largely male nar- rative in the construction of Mrican-Ameri- can literary tradition. In this regard, the early work of Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Christian comes to mind-as well as that of Alice Walker who is responsible for rescuing Zora Neale Hurston from the shad- ows-possibly from oblivion. When Roseann Bell, Bettye Parker and myself published Sturdy Black Bridges in 1979, it was the first anthology of black women's literature, though courses on black women writers later came to Black Studies.

My own contributions in this regard-that is gendering Black Studies-have been most satisfying in two projects, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African Feminist Thought, which re-imagines Mrican-American intellectual and political history by including the voices of black women as far back as 1832. More transgressive, perhaps, has been Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (with Rudolph P. Byrd), which makes the case that the gender progressive discourse of African-American men has been largely ignored in black political history, though there is a growing body of scholarly work about black masculinity. The silence sur- rounding a significant aspect of black men's commitments to a broad range of social jus- tice issues, especially around issues of gender and sexuality, compelled the publication of Traps, This anthology posits that despite the commitment of some black men to the eradi- cation of sexism and heterosexism, black lib- eration has been conceptualized, generally speaking, in the narrowest of terms and has focused heavily on recuperating black man- hood, constructing patriarchal families and ending racism. As urgent as the struggles against white supremacy have been (and

THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 35, NO. 2

Black Studies has contributed to its decline), the relative lack of attention to the eradica- tion of other oppressions has resulted in inadequate conceptual frameworks for understanding the black experience.

H EGEMONIC black nationalist discourse, characterized by both masculinist and heterosexist frameworks, has been particu- larly influential within activist-intellectual communities and has stifled the develop- ment of more egalitarian models of black empowerment which are free from the ideo- logical traps of sexism and homophobia. Put another way, the tendency to conflate black freedom with black manhood, our uncritical acceptance of orthodox conceptions of gen- der, the celebration of normative and rigid constructions of black masculinity, and per- sistent denials about homosexuality have prevented Mrican-Americans from establish- ing the truly revolution communities that Toni Cade Bambara and others challenged us to imagine over thirty years ago in her groundbreaking anthology, The Black Woman.

My discussion of the legacies and chal- lenges of Mrican-American Studies has been shaped by an explicitly black feminist con- ceptual framework and over thirty years of undervalued scholarship and activism that began with the publication of Bambara's The Black Woman in 1970, which has inspired the topic of this article, "What Would Black Stud- ies Be IfWe Had Listened to Toni Cade"?

What is needed are new questions and a new angle of vision:

1.) Gender has become a major category of historical analysis in the study of racial- ized experience here and throughout the Mrican diaspora. How have black schol- ars responded to this major paradigm shift and what can we expect over the next several decades in this regard? What difference would it make for the field of Black Studies or Mrican Diaspora Studies to examine black experience with new frameworks in which gender and sexuali- ty are major categories of analysis?

2.) Men are as influenced by their gender as women. They have also actively participated in the project of gender construction and

Page23

have been profoundly shaped by prevalent notions of what it means to be a man in American society. Since this is the case, scholars must examine men of African descent as gendered beings and continue to mark the ways in which their racial experi- ences have been shaped by gender. Men's lives have been impacted by particular mas- culinity constructs as have women's lives been shaped by specific femininity con- structs. That is, scholars need to explore more fully and systematically how gender sys- tems and gender constructs within particular African diasporic contexts, over time, and across class, have impacted the lived experi- ences of people of African descent. A partic- ular challenge is studying gender constructs in the African context prior to the transat- lantic slave trade, though these excavation projects are necessary.

4.) Scholars must also analyze the taboo sub- ject of sexuality throughout Africa and the African diaspora, including the complexity of our erotic desires and behaviors. The AIDS pandemic and the controversial and under-explored "down-low" phenomenon are compelling issues in this regard.

5.) Despite the fact that Pan-Africanism, Afro- centricism and black feminisms (to a lesser extent) are corrective, oppositional dis- courses that have been critical to the devel- opment of conceptual paradigms and theo- ry building within the interdisciplinary fields of Black Studies, Africana Studies, or African Diaspora Studies, it is also the case that the work of African feminist scholars and activists have been largely ignored in these fields. Professors Sidney Lemele and Robin Kelley have been particularly insight- ful about what is needed to reinvigorate African Diaspora Studies: "the failure to adopt a serious gendered analysis has been perhaps the biggest weakness in diaspora studies, in general, and the historiography of Pan Africanism, in particular; gender offers the freshest and most exciting possi- bilities for the study of diasporic political and cultural movements." It is certainly the case that Black Studies scholars need to explore the emergence of gender discours- es within the African context beginning with Filomena Chioma Steady's foundation- a! text, The Black Woman Crossculturally. In

Page 24

this anthology, she articulates an African feminist framework that is radically differ- ent from Euro-American feminism. Despite the hegemony of Western feminist theory and gender discourses, there is a growing body of work since Steady that can be placed under the rubric of "African femi- nisms," which provides an alternative lens for examining women's resistance transna- tionally. Scholars are certainly compelled to consider this important new work as the field of Black or Africana Studies is re-imag- ined. In particular, the work of contempo- rary African feminist intellectuals, scholars, writers, artists and activists, though they continue to be accused at home of diluting the struggle against imperialism and neo- colonialism, has the potential for trans- forming Black Studies, which has been lim- ited in many ways by anti-feminist and masculinist paradigms. These counter-dis- courses by African women intellectuals need to be taken seriously as the important field of Black Studies continues to evolve.

BLACK STUDIES has contributed in impor-tant ways to the transformation of American higher education and the strug- gles of black people around the globe. If it stays true to its liberatory politics, its trans- gressive mission and its intellectual agenda, it must now address a new set of questions and issues that will illuminate the complex experiences of African descended people in even more profound ways.

Works Cited

Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman (New York: New American Library, 1970).

Roseann Bell, Bettye Parker, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Sturdy Black Bridges (Detroit: Gale Publishing, 1979)

Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bioomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Anna Julia Cooper. A Voice from the South (Xenia, OH: The Aldine Printing House, 1892)

Kimberle Crenshaw in Black Men on Gender, Race and Sexuality, Devon Carbado, ed. (New York: NYU Press, 1999).

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995).

Filomena Chioma Steady, The Black Woman Cross- culturally, Boston: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1981).

THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 35, NO. 2