Kimberly Nichele Brown. Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women's Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. x + 280 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-00470-3; $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35525-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22246-6.
Reviewed by Ashley Farmer (Harvard University)
Published on H-1960s (September, 2011)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-Smith (University of the Fraser Valley)
Rethinking Subjectivities
Scholarly literature has long addressed what W. E. B. DuBois called a “two-ness” that defines the African American experience. Some have suggested that it is a unique vantage point from which to view the mainstream society and race relations. Others see it as a restricted position, one where African Americans must be constantly constrained by white perceptions and definitions of blackness. This model of African American subjectivity--one that privileges the white audience and white interpretations of blackness--comes under fire in Kimberly Nichelle Brown’s Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva. Brown finds the continual emphasis on Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness problematic. Therefore, the guiding question of her research is: Does continual racial conflict in the United States preclude our ability to “envision an autonomous black subjectivity” informed by black communal directives rather than white perceptions (p. 222)?
This is not an easy question to answer. Yet Brown assiduously attempts to find a response by proposing a paradigmatic shift in thinking about black subjectivity. She takes the academy to task for its continual support and application of the double-consciousness paradigm with little concern for how it suppresses the revolutionary potential of black writers and upholds white standards of race and gender. Instead she suggests that scholars focus on the “decolonizing properties” inherent in black American texts rather than the “psychic and structural doubleneness” that so many writers depend on to characterize the African American experience (p. 9). Moreover, she believes that the best examples of texts that take on this decolonizing project come from the black aesthetics movement, the literary sister of the black power movement. Brown contends that the writers of this movement fostered a shift away from white definitions of race, which, in turn, succeeded in creating a “program of decolonization” for African Americans.
Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva is part of a growing body of scholarship, most notably that of James Smethurst and Cheryl Clarke, that explores the ways in which black authors offered an epistemological shift in thinking about black subjectivity and liberation. For Brown, not unlike Clarke, the most startling reconfigurations of Du Bois’s concept come from the minds and pens of African American women. Specifically, Brown believes that the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Jayne Cortez, and Toni Morrison are key examples of this decolonizing project. These women and a host of other writers used a variety of different literary forms to remap black subjectivity during the height of the black aesthetic and black power movements. Thus examining their writings in depth has the potential to be a daunting and disjointed process. To help provide analytical cohesion, Brown finds a thread that ties together the multiple genres, mediums, and styles of black women writers, “the revolutionary diva.” For Brown, the revolutionary diva is a powerful trope that symbolizes empowerment, transformation, and self-acknowledgement. The revolutionary diva creates and performs from “her own choosing rather than an external and imposed conception of her racial identity” (p. 21). Thus, the revolutionary diva becomes a conduit for black self-actualization rather than victimization and a leader in the battle of decolonization. Brown finds that a particular iteration of the “diva” is present in all of the texts in question in her work.
This two-part framework of decolonization through the “diva” voice is complex and flies in the face of years of scholarship on the African American condition. As a result, Brown spends the first chapter in a lengthy engagement with existing scholarship. She takes on literary scholars, historians, and social scientists who cling to the idea of double consciousness as the persistent feature of the black experience. The second chapter builds on the theoretical foundations of the first by using Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970) and Essence magazine as further evidence of the inadequacies of Du Bois’s binary framework. Brown points to the work of black power intellectuals like Frances Beal as well as contemporary intellectuals like Deborah King to show the ways in which African Americans have a long tradition of thinking from a “multiple consciousness” (race, class, gender) vantage point rather than simply a double consciousness. This unique vantage point created what she calls a “black nationalist feminism” in the 1970s that offered an important corrective to mainstream images of black women and a new roadmap for black liberation. A critical component of this black nationalist and feminist project was redefining the black woman through the eyes of the black community and identifying her revolutionary potential.
Students of black power and black feminism will appreciate Brown’s analysis of The Black Woman. While others, namely Stephan Ward, have discussed “black power feminism” among African American women, few have truly sketched the contours of this theory through black women’s writings (Farah Jasmine Griffin serves as a notable exception). Readers will also find Brown’s reading of Essence as a black nationalist text an intriguing one. While studies of black periodicals like Essence often label such magazines as “progressive” or “integrationist” because of the featured ads and pictures of mainstream black women, Brown contends that the revolutionary impetus of Essence lies in the articles written by editors and contributors that support and implement black power. Together these texts serve as poignant examples of the ways in which African American women sought to decolonize black audiences by creating new rubrics for understanding community, womanhood, beauty, and power.
The remaining chapters of Brown’s text move from examining the collected works to examining the work of three individual “divas,” Angela Davis, Jayne Cortez, and Toni Cade Bambara. Perhaps the most poignant chapter of the book is Brown’s examination of Angela Davis and her purposeful manipulation of her public image in order to incite revolution. Brown reads Davis’s public appearances, speeches, and autobiography as texts through which black women learn how to become revolutionary subjects (p. 116). Furthermore she suggests that our view of Angela Davis as a revolutionary icon is too simplistic and does not account for the ways in which Davis co-opted her public image in the service of decolonizing black minds. This multilevel examination of Davis’s political intent and influence is a welcome one as many relegate African American women to superficial roles in enacting radical black politics. Furthermore, Brown astutely understands that Davis gained an exceptional level of notoriety and influence during the black power movement and therefore may not be representative of black women’s political outlooks and goals. Therefore, the final two chapters examine lesser-known African American writers and activists to bolster her argument. The remaining chapters offer interesting and thought-provoking analyses of the poetry of Jayne Cortez and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters (1980). In each instance Brown asserts that the women understood the revolutionary potential inherent in black communities and sought to use their own image or work in service of bringing about revolutionary change. Brown’s analysis of the public and private writings of these three intellectuals shows how the authors take features of oppression (such as rape) and make them into weapons for fighting oppression. Her examination of these understudied intellectuals is a welcome addition to the burgeoning study of black power where black women are not often taken seriously as political philosophers.
In sum, Brown’s work is one of the most thorough studies and critiques of black women’s writing to date. Therefore the framework and analysis in Writing the Revolutionary Diva poses multiple benefits for the fields of American history and literature as well as black power studies. First among them is a new framework for understanding black identity spurred by black power protest at the height of the 1960s and 1970s. Too often scholarship labels the black power movement a failure after cursory analyses of the political projects set forth by activists. Brown shows us that black power activists were not just protesting racial discrimination; they were proffering new frameworks for understanding the black experience outside of strict racial binaries. Second, she reminds readers that “black power” existed in many forms and had many advocates, including black women. This forces us to continually rethink our embedded impressions concerning black power activists. Finally, by blurring the disciplinary boundaries in her readings of decolonizing texts, Brown reminds us of the importance of this period for all areas of study. I would press Brown to be more specific in how she sees the “diva” functioning in the texts in question. I would also welcome a discussion about the utility of her diva framework for understanding decolonizing texts written by those who are not African American women. Nevertheless, what Brown proposes and accomplishes in this text is exciting, thought-provoking, and bold. This is especially true of her coda, in which she openly refuses to distance herself and her experiences from the subjects and writing of the text. It is rare that we find a scholar who is able to offer such poignant analysis and perspective while grappling with her own subjectivity and consciousness that is so intimately tied to her subjects’.
By the end of Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva Brown has amassed an impressive array of texts that successfully imagine an autonomous black subjectivity unencumbered by white standards. She proves that we can and should think of new frameworks besides that of the racial binary to understand and interpret black experiences. After all, as Brown shows us, African American women have been imagining such a theoretical position for years.
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Citation:
Ashley Farmer. Review of Brown, Kimberly Nichele, Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women's Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text.
H-1960s, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32916
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