Quiet brown buddha(s): Black women intellectuals, silence and American culture.

摘要

Through examining current works of art, cultural criticism, literary theory, and racial theory, this dissertation examines the construction of a tradition of African-American women's intellectualism, inaugurated with the publishing of Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South in 1892. More specifically, I explore what happens when intellectual discourse by black women, as Karla Holloway suggests, shifts or locates itself within an African-American cultural matrix. By interrogating the culturally specific strategies of reading, writing, and interpreting provided by women like bell hooks and Patricia Williams, this dissertation asserts that contemporary black women theorists are reconfiguring the intellectual life in new and empowering ways.; Using Marita Bonner's essay, “On being Young, Colored, and A Woman,” Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, and Alice Walker's “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” as frame texts, I seek to define what intellectualism is for black women. It seems that the definition must be race and gender specific and is vastly different from our traditional concepts of the term. Working principally with the concepts of intellectualism put forth by William Banks, Joy James, bell hooks, Cornel West, and Alice Walker, I locate the source of this difference. Moreover, I make the claim that intellectual writing by black women is almost always tied to the desire to establish a sense of agency or identity in the text.; Beginning with Alice Walker's understanding of what it was like for a woman such as Phillis Wheatley, who was born a slave, to attempt to become an artist, I trace the development of the intellectual impulse from slavery to the present. I end my work with an examination of the career of Toni Morrison, who has become perhaps the contemporary symbol of the intellectual black woman, with the publishing of her novels, short stories, plays, books of literary criticism and race theory, her winning of the Nobel Prize, and her frequent appearances on Oprah's book club. Tied in with this analysis of the intellectual lives of black women is a critique of the way that perceptions of black female identity both helps and hinders the reception of their cultural products. My work is in part based on Ann duCille's and bell hooks' understanding of commodity culture and the seductiveness of narratives of “Otherness.” Moreover, this study seeks to separate out female intellectualism from a tradition of black male intellectualism that is largely configured by people like W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry Louis Gates.