Critical Perspectives on bell hooks by Davidson Maria del Guadalupe; Yancy George

Author:Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe; Yancy, George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2009-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Black women negotiated the public gaze of the liminal space as both a body empowered and a body made vulnerable and disordered. Peterson argues that this negotiation of the public gaze and the interpretations of black women’s bodies and voices by diverse audiences meant that “from their dislocated and liminal positions these black women ultimately turned to the literary representation of self-marginalization—to the writing of self, spirituality, and travel, the reprinting of public lectures, and the creation of fictional worlds—in an attempt to veil the body while continuing racial uplift activities in the public sphere.”29 Writing and speaking, then for these women are examples of “talking back” as they reacted to their exclusion from organized institutions designed for racial uplift or women’s empowerment. Indeed, as Peterson points out, nineteenth century black women utilized a diversity of modes of literary representation in order to address an epistemological issue: how to represent the relationship of the self to the self and the other.30

As black women continue to recover past voices as well as write themselves anew amidst the public gaze; as we continue to place black women’s voices at the center, we continue to reveal and locate the coming to power, coming to voice, and liberatory transformation of consciousness painfully won historically by black women. More importantly, we can come to comprehend the risks taken by black women to speak and be heard. By doing so, we may increase the possibilities and spaces for further phenomenological analyses of the oppressed, hidden, neglected experiences attempting to transform the society and world around black women.

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