Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community.

Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum, 1995, 191pp. $19.95 (cloth).

The first African-American woman to be ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (1973), and the first to earn a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary (1983), Katie Geneva Cannon is now Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University, Philadelphia. Her book consists of fourteen essays published over the past fifteen years, accompanied by a new introduction. It begins and ends with essays that evoke her family story-telling atmosphere and witness to the history of American slavery, as well as to her people's cultural heritage of survival amidst this history. It invites tears with anger, love, and respect for her people. The book as a whole is a rich tapestry that illustrates the particularities of African-American women's lives and offers various ethical insights. Since the title captures the essentials of the book as well as Cannon's standing as an African-American ethicist, let us look closely at each word in the title.

Cannon identifies the canon in the literary tradition of African-American women, where she finds "the critical contestable issues at the center of black life- issues inscribed on the bodies of Black people" (70). This literary tradition hands on ethical values and emancipatory praxes African-American women have cultivated in their context of American slavery, both historically and symbolically. Canon formation is helpful for the community, she holds, "to conserve what has survived from the past and release what may shape the present and the future" (76).

In her naming of "Katie's canon," she is not apolitically personalizing or psychologizing this spiritual resource. Her concern for the African-American community in its political context permeates the entire book. Articulating the contextuality and particularity of our perspectives, she challenges the hegemonic universalization of Western discourse. "Katie's canon," then, is not only a confessional designation but an open invitation, to all of her people and those who care about their "doing, knowing, and being" (141), to value this spiritual resource.

The soul of the black community has long been orally transmitted by generations who prevailed against the odds with moral integrity. This soul, Cannon finds, is manifested most sharply in African-American women's literature. Their stories demythologize and reconceptualize in their own terms the history of American slavery, a history formerly told predominantly from slave-owners' perspectives.

A "womanist" is one who values this soul and the well-being of the black community. Alice Walker first coined the term "womanist" from "womanish," the opposite of "girlish." A womanist is a "black feminist" who is audacious, courageous, responsible, serious, and traditionally capable. Committed to the survival and wholeness of her entire people, she loves the spirit, the Folk, women, and herself (22). Thus, the term "womanist" expresses African-American feminist consciousness; it is deeply rooted in the soul of the black community. Appropriating Walker's concept as a critical methodological framework, Cannon created the term "womanism," as a call for a justice-seeking movement from "brutal cycles of misery and violence" to a "promising future" (25).

As part of womanism, Cannon describes her heuristic pedagogy of liberation ethics. Its purpose is "debunking, unmasking, and disentangling the ideologies, theologies, and systems of value operative in a particular society." It is performed "by analyzing the established power relationships that determine cultural, political, and economic presuppositions and by evaluating the legitimating myths that sanction the enforcement of such values." It is necessary "in order that we [the black community] may become responsible decision-makers who envision structural and systemic alternatives that embrace the well-being of us all" (138). For example, in analyzing the history of the African-American community, Cannon unmasks a structure in which white-supremacist racism functions as the indispensable ingredient for the development of a capitalist political economy, and maintains with Oliver C. Cox that the elimination of a capitalist mode of production is essential to make racism dysfunctional.

It is important, however, to observe that Cannon's womanism does not idealize African-American community. Rather, she critically examines two of its major problems: sexism in the black church, and the failure of their community to recognize different virtues in the context of survival. While the African-American church has been "the citadel of hope" (53) for their community and African-American women have made significant contributions to its "up-lift," Cannon observes that not only dominant Western value systems but also the African-American church perpetuates androcentric and misogynist preaching, teaching, and practices. In order to break out of this dilemma, Cannon suggests addressing Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's hermeneutical questions to "Black sacred rhetoric": (1) how is its meaning constructed?, (2) whose interests does it serve?, and (3) what kind of worlds does it envision? (121).

Cannon also argues for the crucial importance of communal recognition of contextually particular values and virtues. For example, Zora Neale Hurston employed "unctuousness" (91) as a strategic virtue which allowed her to prevail with integrity against the cruel system of triple (race, class, and gender) oppression. Without communal recognition of such virtues, Cannon warns, African-American women were and are forced to embrace the conventional morality of Western middle-class male oriented ideals. Cannon points out the danger of the African-American community's unconscious complicity with their own oppression.

I would like to press Cannon on two issues. My first concern is the way she approaches the Bible. Cannon acknowledges the fact that "the Bible is the highest source of authority for most Black women," and that they "search the Scriptures to learn how to dispel the threat of death in order to seize the present life" (56). She also recognizes that the Bible has been used to support not only slavery but also exploitation of black people (46). But as a feminist biblical theologian, from a context of Bible-centered Japanese churches in a non-Christian setting, I am keenly aware of the oppressive dimensions of the authoritative claim for the Bible as the Christian canon. It seems ethically crucial to take the Bible, not as a mythical authoritative archetype, but as a historical formative prototype (to borrow terms from Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza), so that we as faith communities have the authority and responsibility to listen appreciatively and critically to various faith-testimonies of our ancestors. I would like to hear Cannon articulate her views on this point.

My second concern is the way distinction and integration are envisioned in the shaping of liberation ethics. Cannon argues for distinction; that is, she embraces particular contextual ethics rather than hegemonic universalizing ethics. At the same time, as an inclusive ethicist, she urges us to overcome narrow partisanship and encourages mutual appropriation and reciprocity between "white feminists" and "black womanists" (135).

As a feminist from an Asian context, I suggest shifting from a monochromatic vision for distinction and integration to the complexity of a multi-color vision. What I hope to pursue are ethics that will inspire and nourish our lives in terms of multi-ethnicity, gender, class, and I would add, global ecological wholeness. Through the collaboration of women of various colors, I believe we can birth and celebrate such ethics with alternative strategies as we head toward the twenty-first century.

SATOKO YAMAGUCHI