| Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism revives
and critiques four African American and Francophone Caribbean
women writers sometimes overlooked in discussions of early twentieth-century
literature: Guadeloupean Suzanne Lacascade (dates unknown),
African American Marita Bonner (1899–1971), Martinican Suzanne
Césaire (1913–1966), and African American Dorothy West (1907–1998).
Reexamining their most significant work, Jennifer M. Wilks shows
how their writing challenges prevailing racial archetypes—such
as the New Negro and the Negritude hero—of the period from the
1920s to the 1940s, and explores how these writers tapped into
modernist currents from expressionism to surrealism to produce
progressive treatments of race, gender, and nation which differed
from those of currently canonized black writers of the era,
the great majority of whom are men.
Wilks begins with Lacascade, whom she deems "best known for
being unknown," reading Lacascade's novel Claire-Solange,
âme africaine (1924) as a proto-feminist, proto-Negritude
articulation of Caribbean identity. She then examines the
fissures left unexplored in New Negro visions of African American
community by showing the ways in which Bonner's essays, plays,
and short stories highlight issues of economic class. Césaire
applied the ideas and techniques of surrealism to the French
language, and Wilks shows how her writings in the journal,
Tropiques (1941-45), directly and insightfully engage
the intellectual influences that informed the work of canonical
Negritude. A close reading of West's The Living Is Easy
(1948) offers a retrospective critique of the forces that
continued to circumscribe women's lives in the midst of the
social and cultural awakening presumably embodied in the New
Negro.
To show how the black literary tradition has continued to
confront the conflation of gender roles with social and literary
conventions, Wilks examines these writers alongside the late
twentieth-century writings of Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison.
Unlike many literary analysts, Wilks does not bring together
the four writers based on geography. Lacascade and Césaire
came from different Caribbean islands, and though Bonner and
West were from the United States, they never crossed paths.
In considering this eclectic group of women writers together,
Wilks reveals the analytical possibilities opened up by comparing
works influenced by multiple intellectual traditions.
Jennifer M. Wilks is an assistant professor
of English and African and African American Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin.
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