Black Women’s Writing, the Fictions of Segregation, and the Human

FAIN: FT-291353-23

Mollie Amelia Godfrey
James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)

Writing leading to a book on Black women writers’ distinct humanist vision and interventions in social realist literature.

Brave Humanisms argues that long prior to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s-1980s, Black women writers of the segregation era recognized and resisted the violence of Western humanism. For writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry, the capacity of narrative forms to consider human identities in relation to historical, material, and embodied particularities offered a direct challenge to the exclusionary logic of Western humanism that sustained U.S. segregation (ca. 1896–1964). However, rather than demanding recognition or inclusion by Western humanism, they demanded that we retheorize the human and humanisms altogether. Brave Humanisms recovers these writers’ radical reclamation of the human and, in so doing, restores Black women's segregation-era writing to the center of humanistic and post-humanistic study.