Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject.

Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. Carole Boyce Davies. New York: Routledge, 1994. ix + 228 pages. $16.95 paper.

Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject impels black feminist literary and critical discourse into the field of cultural critical theory. There, it traces its territorial negotiations with other discourses that also challenge the modernist politics of imperialism, racism, and sexism from "within" the Western metropolis--post-modernist theories--and from "without"--postcolonial, and other non-Western and anti-dominant positions. These discourses, Carole Boyce Davies tells us, operate with black feminist writing in "braid-like or web-like" figurations.

Far from situating black feminism in singular locations, Boyce Davies marks out a "politics of location" as she both identifies and theorizes agency in relation to the cross-hatching themes of geographic place and displacement, social and economic positionality, ethnic, racial, gender and sexual boundaries, and the experiences of (im)migration and alienness. Rather than deduce "experience" from identity, Boyce Davies's method focuses on the politics that shape experience: "It is important ... to differentiate between activist Black feminists and conservative Black women scholars (even when they are working on women), between those who are committed to social change and those who want fuller participation in systems as they exist."

Echoing Adrienne Rich's reminder to North American feminists of the imperialist presumptions their geographic location entails, Boyce Davies rejects the exclusivist politics of black feminism in identifying "black woman" with African Americans in the United States. Instead, she posits a cross-cultural examination of black women's resistance and welcomes alliances with Western feminist and other liberatory projects. In a metaphor that recalls Zora Neale Hurston's mediations of difference between the Eatonville black folk and the passing white travellers, in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Boyce Davies depicts black feminism's negotiation of space with other "oppositional" discourses: It is "going a piece of the way with them."

In its focus on the tensions and alliances between a "portable" black women's community and the subject-positions of the Others it encounters, Boyce Davies's critical praxis is particularist without being exclusivist, anti-foundationalist without losing its oppositional potential, and "postmodernist" without subordinating its black feminist contestatory agenda to an overarching horizon of poststructuralist theory. Boyce Davies challenges the neo-colonialist attitude of much Theory and asks questions such as "How do we theorize, who are the theorists, and what is theory?" In answering these questions, she invokes Barbara Christian's essay "The Race for Theory" and its scathing critique of today's use of poststructuralist theory as a critical Procrustean bed on which the cultural productions of different social groups are to fit exactly. In Boyce Davies's view, theory "ought not to be an impediment to movement but should be an enabling set of discourses." Shifting from the noun "theory" to the verb "theorize," Boyce Davies agrees with Christian, would help dismantle the binary of "theory or no theory." Moreover, this shift would allow for an understanding of "theory" not as a "reified discourse" but as "frames of intelligibility" through which we interpret the world or as "discursive ways of making sense of structures of vales and belief which circulate in any given culture" (Teresa Ebert's "Political Semiosis in/of American Culture Studies," qtd. in Boyce Davies). Thus, in addition to using poststructuralist theory to explicate, explore, and expand black women's fictional and critical texts, Boyce Davies stresses these texts's contribution to theory: Although seldom acknowledged, black women's analyses of the variables of race, gender, class, and sexuality as configurations of multiple and mutually interrogative positions--have initiated and enhanced the dismantling of unitary subjectivities in the academe.

The dichotomy between "theory" and "no theory" is challenged further in Black Women Writing: Migrations of the Subject as Boyce Davies points to the theoretical reverberations in the creative works she examines. She observes, for example, that although Toni Morrison's Beloved is a novel resisting single, laudatory readings, it is also a theoretical diatribe on the discontents of humanist "representation" and its exclusivist inscriptions of received histories and subjectivities. According to Boyce Davies, in addition to offering a "counter-mnemonic" account of American slavery, Morrison's novel also theorizes the need for feminists to "historicize" and "racialize" representations of motherhood and womanhood before they proceed to construct totalizing programmatics.

All of the writers discussed in Boyce Davies's text work through--in both senses--critiques of representation and subjectivity. And, as Boyce Davies copiously demonstrates, they do so variously. For example, Morrison's Beloved and Shirley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose rewrite the story of American slavery from the perspective of the slave mother. In the process, they subvert not only the paradigm of the flight "from slavehood to manhood"--the slave narrative that mythologized the fleeing male slave's rugged individuality, physical strength, and geographic mobility, thus obscuring the experience of the female slave--but also the "historical construction of the Black woman as the `great mother,' negatively embedded in the `mammy' figure of Euro-American imagination." On the other hand, Michelle Cliff's Claiming an Identity That Taught Me to Despise and Jamaica Kincaid's Small Place, At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy are efforts of the migratory desire to represent "home." But the nationalist myth of "home" as a seamless narrative of singular origin is here rejected along with any monolithic and unproblematized conception of Caribbean identity. Instead, these texts focus on the negotiations at the borders of gender, heritage, sexuality, and geographic place, as the characters attempt to define their multivalent identities.

Boyce Davies's book is exciting and informative and inclusive of most contemporary theoretical thinking that relates to the study of black women writing cross-culturally. Perhaps too inclusive. The text is congested with references to and quotations from disparate theorists who, rather than elucidate, often detract from Boyce Davies's arguments. And Boyce Davies often glosses over major differences in the methodologies favored by the theorists she examines. The positions of Barbara Christian, bell hooks, and Teresa Ebert on the impact of poststructuralism on coeval literary criticism, for example, are much more sharply differentiated than Boyce Davies would want us to know.

But Boyce Davies's investment here is in contextual commonalties, convergences, spaces of affirmative negotiations among differing locations--theoretical and otherwise. Trading in the notions of identity politics and historical and geographic synchronicity--all dictated by what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls the "law of Eurocentric temporality" --Boyce Davies embraces a "temporality of struggle." This, as Mohanty explains in "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," is a "chronotopic" dimension where the "inherited locations" of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality join forces with the chosen, "strategic locations" of the self to subvert existing power relations (Copyright 1). In this space of slippery geography but steadfast politics, Boyce Davies can learn from Gayatri Spivak about non-Western women's interpellation in imperialistic discourses and, in turn, can warn Spivak of the dangers of erasing "race" as an analytical category in postcolonial theorizations. This notion of a "temporality of struggle" as a space of multiple and non-synchronous dialogue is central to Carole Boyce Davies's reading of contemporary black feminism, which she expands to include women's discourse across the locations of the African diaspora as well as its alliances with other discourses in its opposition to various forms of domination. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, then, critically outlines the black feminist journey through these "inherited" and "strategic" locations and, thus, provides a map for the more focused projects of future feminist excursions.

Helene Hinis is Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing at Springfield College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her published work includes three books on writing and essays on African American literature, feminist theory, and the study of culture.