Black Female Movement: Conceptualizing Places of Consciousness for Black Female Subjectivity

Abstract

With the increased awareness of places of locations as political has come some discussion on the subject of black women in which feminists and cultural critics try to make meaning of what space and location signify for the colonized, particularly for those who have been relegated to the margins, borders, and boundaries of center discourse in subordinate positions. At one end of thought, in regards to movement, is Tate’s notion that the black woman or female heroine “must conduct her quest within close boundaries” and “she remains stationary” (Tate xx). At the other end of the spectrum is my idea that any possibilities of change for black women’s positions come with a complete break or move from hegemonic practices of exclusion. It is the move from the margins and boundaries, as I suggest, that provides a safe location in which to come to terms with the black female experience and to recover black female consciousness.

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenting.

—Marti Heidegger¹

Black women’s literary tradition therefore includes multiple ways of interpreting existence for black women in a society that defines them narrowly—if it chooses to make visible at all.

—Joyce Pettis²

As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, “the politics of location” necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision.

—bell hooks³