Looking for “the Alternative [s] ”: Locating Sapphire’s PUSH in African American Literary Tradition through Literacy and Orality

Abstract

Writings by African American women historically have received less attention than those by their white or male counterparts. With the exception of Toni Morrison, works by even the most prolific Black women writers have gone out of print for lack of popular or academic interest.¹ For this reason, scholarship on recovering Black women’s history and writings has increased significantly in the last 20 years, focusing primarily on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors. However, the likelihood of contemporary writings going out of print is not impossible, which is a substantial reason to ensure that works are critiqued by scholars and taught in courses. Unfortunately, I perceive a marked lack of attention to Sapphire’s work by scholars in academe. In particular, her critically acclaimed novel PUSH has not garnered the attention it deserves, particularly in scholarship on African American literature. In conferences I have attended over the last 10 years, I recall very few papers presented on PUSH. A search of the Modern Language Association Bibliography yields eight articles and book chapters on the text, mostly focused on survivor narratives and the clinical uses of narrative as therapeutic device. Rafia Zafar declares, “We should not depend on what materials the MLA Bibliography includes to estimate scholarly attention, nor should we confuse the so-called center of academic discourse with the sum of intellectual work” (5).