{"id":26139,"date":"2012-10-22T05:33:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T05:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26139"},"modified":"2012-10-24T01:39:02","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T01:39:02","slug":"%e2%80%9cmaneuvers-of-silence-and-the-task-of-%e2%80%98new-negro%e2%80%99-womanhood%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26139","title":{"rendered":"\u201cManeuvers of Silence and the Task of \u2018New Negro\u2019 Womanhood\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cManeuvers of Silence and the Task of \u2018New Negro\u2019 Womanhood\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Narrative Theory<\/a>
\nVolume 42, Number 1<\/a>, Spring 2012
\npages 46-68
\nDOI: 10.1353\/jnt.2012.0006<\/a><\/p>\n

Emily M. Hinnov<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Lecturer of English
\nGranite State College, Concord, New Hampshire<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic mechanism, wrought mainly by the World War and its aftermath. Along the entire gamut of social, economic and political attitudes, the New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted is resolutely marching toward the liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Editorial, The Messenger\u2019s \u201cNew Negro Woman\u201d issue (1923)
\nBut I have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman; [it\u2019s] so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM\u2014the great national game of TABOO.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Anne Spencer, qtd. in Countee Cullen\u2019s Caroling Dusk<\/em> (1927)
\nHere is a woman who tried to be decisive in extremis. She \u201cspoke,\u201d but women did not, do not, \u201chear\u201d her. Thus she can be defined as a \u201csubaltern\u201d\u2014a person without lines of social mobility.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, \u201cCan the Subaltern Speak?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given the primitivist stereotypes projected upon African American women as oversexed, exotic creatures during the Harlem Renaissance era, contemporaneous poet Anne Spencer\u2019s statement suggests that women writers\u2019 doubly conscious performance of self must have been challenging (to say the least). With her comment about the state of \u201cNew Negro Womanhood\u201d in mind, we might ask: to what extent were women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance successful in critiquing representations of race or gender within the context of that male-dominated literary and cultural movement? Forthright literary depictions of race, gender, and mobility in now canonical Harlem Renaissance works by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston allow expression of varied facets of the African American woman\u2019s experience during the early part of the twentieth century. Hurston\u2019s women (and Hurston herself) refuse to be \u201ctragically colored\u201d and instead embrace the power inherent in their female sexuality\u2014even using it, in part, remain perpetually mobile. For Larsen, however, the triple bind of double-consciousness, female sexuality, and white supremacy eventually disallows any true mobility for her fictional characters. When Larsen was accused of plagiarism in 1930, there were no legal charges, but her career never recovered from this blow. It seemed that \u201cin America, whites might borrow from blacks with impunity, but Negro use of white materials is always suspect\u201d (Douglas 105). As Ann Douglas writes, \u201cThe New Negro was a figure with few claims on mainline America\u2019s attention, interest, or sympathy. If he insulted or displeased, he could be cut off, erased, without thought or regret\u201d (106). It is difficult to determine how much mutuality between black and white artists and audiences could have existed in light of Larsen\u2019s fate. She was \u201ccut off\u201d from what has developed into the African American literary canon essentially because she was a black female artist working within the confines of a racist and sexist culture. Thankfully, Larsen\u2019s rediscovery in the 1980s, and the subsequent inclusion of her work in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms, enabled Larsen\u2019s legacy to resist such erasure. Larsen and Hurston\u2019s work has triumphantly evaded the threat of removal from the literary canon thanks to the gynocritical efforts of many feminist scholars, while other writers of the era still languish on the critical precipice of silence.<\/p>\n

In this essay, I am especially interested in the ways in which two still largely ignored Harlem Renaissance women writers, Elise Johnson McDougald, in her more straightforward essay \u201cThe Task of Negro Womanhood<\/a>,\u201d and Marita O. Bonner<\/a>, in her multigenred, haltingly-titled \u201cOn Being Young\u2014a Woman\u2014and Colored,\u201d use silence as a means to maneuver among the various identity positions that comprise the interstices of \u201cNew Negro Womanhood.\u201d Placing them within the context of more widely known writers of their era such as Hurston and Larsen is edifying,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cManeuvers of Silence and the Task of \u2018New Negro\u2019 Womanhood\u201d Journal of Narrative Theory Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2012 pages 46-68 DOI: 10.1353\/jnt.2012.0006 Emily M. Hinnov, Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Lecturer of English Granite State College, Concord, New Hampshire Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[12567,12570,12569,55,8815,12568],"class_list":["post-26139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-elise-johnson-mcdougald","tag-emily-hinnov","tag-emily-m-hinnov","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-journal-of-narrative-theory","tag-marita-o-bonner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}