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.

Associated Products

Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow (Book)
Title: Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow
Author: Mollie Godfrey
Abstract: In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation. Through these narratives, they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations of Black feminists. By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, Godfrey also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationships between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215296.html
Publisher: The Ohio State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8142-594

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