Gender, Segregation, and Urban Life in Literature by African American Women

FAIN: HB-258040-18

Jennifer D. Williams
Morgan State University (Baltimore, MD 21251-0001)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on urban literature written by African American women between the Great Depression and the civil rights era.

Intimate Cities examines urban literature after the Great Depression and before the civil rights movement in order to demonstrate the ways that black women’s imaginative claims to the city betray a longing for freedom and full access to American citizenship. Black women’s urban narratives complicate spatial divisions, such as those between home and the street or spaces of privacy and sociality. Indeed, the negotiation of urban space charted in black women’s literary and cultural texts displays a dynamic interplay among bodies, structures, and technologies. Many literary studies of American cities rest on urban crisis discourses that highlight men’s struggles to find employment, feelings of isolation, and incidents of violence and criminality. Intimate Cities refocuses the masculine, crisis centered gaze toward everyday practices of living. It also broadens the parameters of “the city” to incorporate public as well as domestic spaces.

Associated Products

“Productive Precarity: African American Writing during the Depression Era” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Productive Precarity: African American Writing during the Depression Era”
Author: Jennifer D. Williams
Abstract: This paper examines Marita Bonner’s Chicago stories that begin in 1933 with the serialized “A Possible Triad of Black Notes” and culminate with “One True Love” (1941). More specifically, I argue that Bonner’s portrayals of Frye Street women upend narratives of domesticity and respectability that characterize New Negro women’s literature. In this way, Bonner anticipates the transition to social realism that was embraced by Alain Locke and further promulgated by Richard Wright in his “Blueprint for Negro Writers” as well as his fiction. Wright, among other mostly male social realists, was preoccupied with how racism and class oppression impacted black men. Hence, social realist fiction often depicts the representative and “authentic” black urban subject as a proletarian male. However, Bonner’s focus on black women workers broadens the “narrow orbit” Wright affords black northern women and privileges black women as urban subjects. Bonner’s representations of urban black womanhood signal the postwar fiction of Ann Petry and Gwendolyn Brooks, whose female protagonists also moved in and throughout the streets of Harlem and Bronzeville.
Date: 07/25/2019
Conference Name: Modern Language Association International Symposium

“‘The North’s Lynch Mobs’: The Afterlife of Segregation” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “‘The North’s Lynch Mobs’: The Afterlife of Segregation”
Abstract: This presentation connects the viral “#LivingWhileBlack” videos to a broader narrative of surveilling segregated populations.
Author: Jennifer D. Williams
Date: 11/08/2018
Location: Chapel Hill, NC

---