“Godfrey recasts histories of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and—crucially—the midcentury as much more integrally feminist than previously acknowledged and positions the writers of these earlier generations as a missing link in a longer trajectory of Black subjectivity and its aesthetic representations.” —John K. Young, author of The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism
“Who said close reading is dead? Godfrey’s deft attention to the diverse novels and cultural histories of the likes of Hopkins, Larsen, Hurston, and Petry is thorough and compelling, and her many analytical threads connect back to ongoing conversations about Black women’s writing.” —Howard Rambsy II, author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers
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.
Photo courtesy of Mollie Godfrey
Mollie Godfrey is Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the editor of Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry and Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow.
Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction The Brave Humanism of Black Women Writers
Chapter 1 Of One Blood: Blood Brotherhood in the Black Woman’s Era
Chapter 2 No Sanctuary: Plagiarism, Primitivism, and the Politics of Recognition
Chapter 3 Folk in the Flesh: Insides, Outsides, and the Object of Anthropology
Chapter 4 Networks of Care: Sentiment, Sociology, and the Protest Fiction Debate
Chapter 5 Renaissance Women: Vision and Vulnerability in the Black Chicago Renaissance
Coda Bravery and the Backlash: Lorraine Hansberry at the Forum
Bibliography
Index
