Introduction: Places, Borders, and Margins—Locating a Black Feminist Model of Interpretation

Abstract

In the above passage from Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900)., the narrator illuminates the course for Mrs. Willis and other black women at the turn of the century in positioning themselves as resourceful and proficient true women. The excerpt from DeLamotte reflects the tireless efforts of women in fighting against female oppression, particularly the barriers that cut off and intrude upon black women’s existence, while hooks’s passage speaks to the usefulness of space for change and renewal. The fact that these passages center on women and place shows the concern of employing space as transformative sites for female renewal. From the publication of Maria W. Stewart’s essays and speeches in 1831 to Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose (1986), locating places to reclaim black female agency as well as implementing change are dominant themes for African American women writers. Essays on and narratives of female enslavement and resistance explicitly demonstrate black women coming to terms with their lesser positions in hegemonic society. Given the impact of the damaging effect of the assigned position that Nanny in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) describes as “mules of the world” (14), it is not surprising that African American women have worked assiduously to change the position that keeps them silent and powerless.

Therefore, she was forced to begin a… pilgrimage—a hunt for the means to help her breast the social tide.

—Pauline Hopkins¹

The psychological, moral, spiritual, and intellectual energies expended in the engagement with the forces of violence are generated by an anxiety about boundaries: those that shut the protagonist off from the world, those that shut the protagonist in, and those that separate the individual self from something that is Other.

—Eugenia DeLamotte²

Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice.

—bell hooks³