Locating the Black female subject: American women's poetry and the evolving landscape of African-American womanhood.

This dissertation revises our understanding of how African American women have resisted and transformed conventional notions of womanhood that construct it as a white, middle-class identity category. The thesis begins by exploring the work of nineteenth-century European American women poets like Lydia H. Sigourney, Ann E. Porter, and Corolla Criswell, whose sentimental portraits of the American home reinforce the prevailing understanding of womanhood as a racialized female identity category. In their poems, these writers depict homes whose features and surroundings display the sweetness, piety, and domesticity associated with the mid-nineteenth-century feminine ideal, the white, middle-class True Woman. Nineteenth-century African American women poets write against their exclusion from this limited vision. Mary E. Tucker Lambert, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Josephine D. (Henderson) Heard and other Black women writing during this period use their poems to invert, distort, and otherwise challenge the relationship between woman and her home suggested by their white counterparts. However, while nineteenth-century Black women poets successfully expose and highlight the exclusionary race politics of the model of the True Woman, they fail to propose an alternative setting for Black womanhood. It is not until the Black Nationalist period of the late-1960s and early- 1970s that African American women poets at last undertake to designate a space for the Black female subject, a setting whose qualities and placement reflect the history, values and conditions of Black women's lives. African American women poets Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton represent this most recent phase in Black women poets' resistance, as they offer up the Black female body itself as a setting upon which to map African American women's complex subjectivity. Shange, Lorde, Giovanni, Clifton and other contemporary African American women writers use their poems in celebration of the Black female body to describe a new and empowering vision of African American womanhood set within the Black female corpus.Ph.D.American literatureBlack historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129712/2/9610188.pd

1001 Black Men : Sport Pages

Cover for 1001 Black Men : Sport Pages, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1585/thumbnail.jp

Gender Studies

Cover for Gender Studies, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1582/thumbnail.jp

Gender Studies : child\u27s play

Cover for Gender Studies : child\u27s play, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1583/thumbnail.jp

1001 Black Men : A Gathering of Old Black Men

Cover for 1001 Black Men : A Gathering of Old Black Men, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1586/thumbnail.jp

Gender Studies : Tiffany Banks

Cover for Gender Studies : Tiffany Banks, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1584/thumbnail.jp

1001 Black Men : Black Nerds, Afro-Geeks, and Dungeon Masters with Soul

Cover for 1001 Black Men : Black Nerds, Afro-Geeks, and Dungeon Masters with Soul, from the RISD Library Zine Collection.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_zinecollection/1587/thumbnail.jp