zoom! phew!

Christian, Barbara. “Trajectories of Self-Definition.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Christian’s essay does exactly what it says: trace the development of the theme of self-definition in black women’s fiction. Her argument arises from a comment by Alexis DeVeaux that an ever-expanding notion of self and self-creation has grown in black women’s work of the late 20th century. Christian’s essay posits that black women’s fiction has expanded the traditional emphasis on legitimizing black women’s identity into a full exploration of self-awareness and autonomy. Christian traces themes from the early 20th century considerations of ideal black womanhood and white audience reception. Increasingly, black women’s writing has placed black women as central to the text, questioned internal sexual politics in the black community, explored “to what community black women must belong in order to understand themselves … in their totality” (242), and addressed increased class and geographical mobility and the potential for greater community power among black women. Christian also praises late 1970s and early 1980s innovations in form and genre, such as Walker’s famous epistolary novel, and Shange, Lorde and Marshall’s use of dreams, poetry, visions, and ritual in their novel-esque works. I would also add Bambara to this list of inter- or cross-disciplinary texts.

Christian’s essay is extremely useful as an easy overview and simple trajectory of the theme of self-definition in black women’s work. It will be helpful to place all writers within a tradition and also back up my claims about how the urge for self-definition became expanded, especially in Walker’s later work, which took this theme into other arenas.