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Struggle for Visibility of African American Women's Literature - Page 2

© Dorothy Harris

writers also actively participate in resiscovering the works of African American women in a manner that contributes to change in the availability as well as the understanding of African American women's work. Mary Helen Washington describes this reconstruction and rediscovery of African American women's literature, and the scholarship that has brought and continues to bring us the history of African American women's literary tradition, as the "enlightenment" to the experiences of African American women as artists and to the themes and ideas that were significant to them.

Significant to understanding the power of the writings of African American women is the need to understand the conscious effort to keep our works inaccessible to us and to mainstream society. These conscious efforts, which have their roots in our earliest experiences in America, are reinforced over and over again, and are manifested in today's classroom. Remnants of oppressive behavior still exists in our attitudes toward teaching African American women's literature.

Limiting access to the works of African American women is to limit the access to understanding more about who we are, and to receiving correct definitions of African Americans, and more specifically, of African American women. It was also effective in keeping us silent, and therefore disempowered. Patricia Hill Collins writes:

The shadow obscuring the Black women's intellectual tradition is neither accidental nor benign. Suppressing the knowledge produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of an independent consciousness in the oppressed can be taken to mean that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in their own victimization maintaining the invisibility of Black women and our ideas is critical in structuring patterned relations of race, gender and class inequality that pervade the entire social structure. (Hill Collins,1990)

Smith, in Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977) discusses not only the need for visibility of African American women in literature, but also of the need for Black feminist critics to give visibility to African American women's literature. Smith asserts that the literature by African American women, and the literature that includes African American women would be made more visibly by giving attention to the literature. Mary Helen Washington asserts the same, as she writes, "Without exception Afro-American women writers have been dismissed by Afro American literary critics until they were rediscovered and reevaluated by feminist critics." (Washington, 1988)

Over a century ago, N.F. Mossell took on the task of discussing the existence of African American women's work. In The Work of the Afro-American Women (1894) she discusses the existence of African American women's literary work in a way that answered doubters at the time of the existence of African American women's work. She thoroughly addresses various types of works by African American women, and she answers questions about our

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