well, that's much more clear, now isn't it? go me!

Susannah Bartlow
Dissertation Prospectus

‘VULNERABILITY AS ARMOR’:
HEALING, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICAL ACTION
IN WALKER, LORDE, BAMBARA AND RICH

“The world is ill. The question these novels raise is how we as a human community will work together to bring it to health.” --Ann Folwell Stanford


At the 2007 National Council for Research on Women conference, womanist scholar Layli Phillips proposed that the next era of feminist scholarship lies in spirituality. American feminism’s major roadblocks—the relative isolation of feminist academic intellectuals and a hostile political environment—will be resolved by taking healing and spiritual advancement as the guiding metaphor and practice of women’s education and action. Phillips’ diagnosis echoed the recent theories of other scholars: Hershini Bhana Young’s Haunting Capital (2006), Judylyn Ryan’s Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature (2004), Ann Folwell Stanford’s Bodies in a Broken World (2003), Gay Wilentz’s Healing Narratives (2000), and the introduction of This Bridge Called My Home (a 2004 update of This Bridge Called My Back) explored healing, haunting, and spiritual forces as the source of women’s strength. Womanist critics bell hooks, M. Jacqui Alexander, AnaLouise Keating, and a host of others have also taken spirituality and love as the central themes of their most recent work.

This scholarly trend is the delayed appearance of spiritual development as a significant presence in academic feminist discourse. Church community and spiritual advancement were, respectively, the context and narrative of American women’s activism ; in the 1970s and 80s, religiously-based community action took on the rhetoric of both New Age spiritualism and woman-centered theology. Yet the master narrative of feminist scholarship, from the perspective of literary studies, emphasizes the sectarian politics of the “second wave;” the institutionalization of women’s studies into the corporate university, and feminism’s turn to liberal reform (in the political sphere) and postmodern theory (in academic circles).
This dissertation counters that strategy, using primary texts and social movement history to argue that spiritual healing through language, especially as written by African diaspora women and their allies, must be read back into feminist literary studies as the defining metaphor of late-twentieth century women’s movements. The complete picture must be broadened to include the rush of cross-disciplinary, woman-centered scholarship since the 1970s addressing issues of healing, spiritual development, theology, and religious community. Even the popular self-help discourses that now dominate the marketplace contain elements of the feminist New Age rhetoric that originated in consciousness-raising, community organizing, and spiritual recovery movements.

I argue that the work of Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich advocates for a self-conscious, creative, embodied, and spiritual process through which women can obtain power. Self-advancement narratives have come to dominate any discussions of women’s empowerment . However, as an intervention in feminist criticism, my work restores both the spiritual and the community-strengthening elements that were integral to this self-empowerment process. To understand these shifts, and articulate a way forward, I examine the work of four prominent poet-activists, all of whom undertake a major shift in the tone and priorities of their work. The transformations in each woman’s artistic life evoke critical themes and debates in their respective communities. By a process of accumulation that mirrors the intuitive and holistic approach of my subjects (hah!), I hope to advance discussions of the healing and political power of poetic language, the responsibility and impact of individual women (especially women of color) within political movements, identity politics within feminism, and spirituality as both a contested and a transformational force. These four major themes are linked irretrieveably with discussions of embodiment, community-building, social movement theory, and subject formation, all of which weave through the dissertation in support of the larger aim: to restore discussions of community accountability and spirituality to conversations about women’s self-empowerment and political action.

One of the key elements of this dissertation is a discussion of the power of poetic language to transform an individual’s response to political trauma. By constructing what Gay Wilentz has termed “wellness narratives,” stories of emotional healing or lived experience that link these intimate tales with context and consequences, each writer explores how creative commitment can heal a political wound. I build on Wilentz’s definition to show how poetic imagination works as a social and political tool through the author’s conscious engagement with the healing power of language. This conscious engagement suggests, as each writer acknowledges, a somewhat transcendent or visionary role for the artist that incorporates both an awareness of intangible realities with a realistic, materialist involvement with contemporary politics.

These writers’ emphasis on poetic transformation leads to the centrality, in their work and in their self-conscious discussions, of the responsibility of the female, especially woman of color, subject to her communities, chosen and/or imposed. In order to articulate this relation precisely—understanding both the particular role of each woman and the shape of the greater community in which she participates—my chapters emphasize turning points in these artists’ careers in which their consciousness of themselves as artists, their community affiliations, and their nature of their work shifted, sharpening in tone and content and in some cases shifting genres as they consciously altered their priorities, commitments, and products. These patterns of a sort of “englightenment” or realization are mirrored within the work, which identifies major character and plot transitions around an individual’s healing process that leaps forward into an ability to connect with clarity with the people around her. This transition into the community is markedly different in each work, but they are all bridged by values of conscious intention, kindness to self and others, and chosen, shared purpose. Each writer ultimately argues, lyrically, that the relation between the self and community is dialogic, self-sustaining, antagonistic, nurturing, and critical (in the sense of both crucial and evaluative). These converging, sometimes conflicting, qualities bind each character and each writer to a sense of committed process as the key to an effective and lasting relation between the politicized self and a political agenda. This relation as process is, I believe, the missing element in privileged feminist discussions of the body and consciousness to social prescriptions and is neglected in pragmatic discussions of the necessary steps for coalitional women’s movements. An awareness of the relation of individual to community is essential to building strong leadership and self-perceptions, not only within political movements, but among as many women as can be reached by those who devote their lives to activist work.

The third essential component to this dissertation is the still-tense discussion of identity politics within women’s movements. Through a series of blended chapters, I hope to respect as well as to bridge the divide between “feminism” and “womanism.” I return to Walker, Lorde, Rich and Bambara as icons of late 20th century justice movements to try to understand the visions they advanced, the work their poetry performed, and what their choices can teach us. Feminism and womanism—though both invested in the advancement of women’s rights and perspectives—are vastly different ontologically. The commonly accepted definitions of feminism—middle-class women’s civil rights activism leading to cultural and professional advancements—do not graze the surface of women-organized social and artistic movements of our living history. Feminist theory most often advances a middle-class analysis that fails to account for the thematic or political interests of a majority of women. Global feminist theory, in turn, focuses on women’s coalition building and political action to the detriment of a long-term vision for creative and spiritual empowerment. Womanism often emphasizes Christian theology, or the lived experience of black women; white feminist theorists mistake this for a genre distinction when, as the chapter on Lorde and Rich will illustrate, these theories originated together in the discourse of socially informed, spiritual healing. This limited historical perspective is due to the healing’s emphasis on self-creation, which became translated, in a patriarchal culture, into a kind of self-obsession that has negated the relation between the individual and the community that was so central to these women’s work.

The fourth and final key echoing through this work is spirituality. A loosely defined term, spirituality permeates our contemporary culture and is a central element of late 20th century feminist discourse. The three dominant spiritual strains present in the work I examine are New Age or mystic secular spirituality, Christian womanist ethics, and transatlantic African recovery. These religious paths were, and are, consciously practiced as tools of empowerment. The ideology advanced in the works of Bambara and Lorde emerges from specific African cosmologies that, as Judylyn Ryan argues, consider body, mind and spirit as integrated tools of spiritual and political practice. Hershini Bhana Young argues, from a similar metaphysics, that the haunting presence of ancestors provides the connective tissue for global women’s empowerment. As Phillips’ womanist invocation suggests, the perspective dominating this dissertation is simultaneously grounded in African diaspora traditions and available across cultures. Alice Walker, for instance, uncovers this connectivity most richly in her work influenced by Native American and American Buddhist thought. The dissertation begins by exploring the iconic Walker and her artistic and spiritual transformations.