When God Lost Her Tongue by Janell Hobson

Author:Janell Hobson [Hobson, Janell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367198329
Google: aiRlzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-30T03:58:20+00:00

Engaging in “child’s play” through this “toy story,” Bennu suggests that such commercial items as a Barbie doll used in the portrayal of our heroic icon are ripe for subversion, especially in signifying on the proliferation of children’s stories about Tubman. The very depiction of “Black Moses Barbie” with a “motivational freedom rifle” accessory – in lieu of clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics – reminds us of the satirical ways that marginalized artists and communities have routinely flipped the scripts from dominant culture to assert and make legible our own stories and histories. Although mainstream American narratives have relegated Harriet Tubman to the safe confines of children’s literature and elementary-school education, she looms large in African American art, which means that fantasy – more than history – does the work of memorialization and monument-making, as seen in Lawrence’s art series, for instance.

The celebration of folk heroes during the Great Depression within African American art, as depicted in Lawrence’s series, is earlier reflected in Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas’s Harriet Tubman mural (1931) at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Such artistic expressions also emerged with the Civil Rights era, which revitalized the symbols of Black history, especially in the mobilization of African American spirituals that were passed down from slavery and recast as “freedom songs” during a movement that included freedom marches and freedom rides. Out of this zeitgeist emerged a new assertion of Black pride and Black feminism in which the icon of Tubman resurfaced in Black liberation politics.

Artworks by Faith Ringgold (with her 1972 Feminist Landscape tanka-based series featuring Tubman) and Elizabeth Catlett (with her 1975 linocut titled Harriet) appeared alongside the political work of Black feminist organizations such as the Combahee River Collective (named for Tubman’s military campaign on the Combahee River) and the literary works of Black women writers who flourished during this era as they highlighted the intersections of racism and sexism in their experiences and turned to the historic examples of women like Tubman to refute Black nationalist arguments for Black male leadership and Black female submission. In her seminal historical work, Women, Race, & Class, Angela Davis reminds us of “numerous women [like Harriet Tubman who] fled slavery for the North. Many were successful, though many more were captured,” thus disrupting the idea that Tubman was “the exception rather than the rule.”14 This suggestion that Tubman’s leadership abilities are qualities that she shared with other Black women aligned with second-wave Black feminist politics.

In reminiscing on her experiences in mounting her Feminist Landscape series, Faith Ringgold describes the following encounter with her artwork on Tubman:

Back in the early seventies black women were in denial of their oppression in order to be in support of their men. This made it very important for me to put the words of . . . valiant black feminists in my art so that people could read them and be as inspired as I had been. At one exhibition, however, a college student was moved to destroy one of the Feminist Landscapes.

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