Contemporary African American fiction repeatedly explores intimacy. These explorations have been most sustained in black women’s writing. Although female authors share an interest in romantic interactions, their portrayals reveal wide-ranging attitudes about this theme. Some accounts depict intimacy as a barrier to female advancement. In other texts, feminine success hinges on maintaining a committed relationship. These distinct outlooks not only reflect competing gender discourses within late 20th, early 21st century America but also significant developments in black women’s literature. In this dissertation, I analyze how fictional depictions of heterosexual intimacy reveal crucial facts about black women’s writing. I argue that various subgenres captured under the heading, popular black women’s literature, include narratives about male-female relationships that complicate the efforts celebrated as the black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s. By focusing on the span from 1965-2000, I suggest that at the same moment when Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor were expressing post-civil rights era black femininity in fictions filled with deteriorating heterosexual intimacy, other black women writers were using popular fiction to expose different possibilities for male-female interconnection. These authors exist in the same socio-cultural milieu as their high modernist peers; however, their writings reflect different reactions to decisions about where intimacy fits in the construction of black identity.
My dissertation contains four chapters, and each chapter engages roughly a decade and considers different dimensions of black female popular literature. Looking at the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s roots of this genre’s interest in intimacy, chapter one establishes Toni Cade Bambara as a founding figure. Chapter two studies the black romance novel from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s concentrating on pioneers, Rosalind Welles and Sandra Kitt. Dealing with Terry McMillan’s rise to fame between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, chapter three examines chick lit, the site where capitalist feminism and black relationship concerns converge. The final chapter uses Terri Woods’ work to interpret ghetto fiction of the late-1990s. Popular black women’s literature notes the dynamic nature of black cultural identity and responds to that dynamism with portraits of intimacy that register shifting intra-racial realities within the broader context of evolutions in inter-racial democracy. By identifying intimacy as a telling theme in post-civil rights era experience, my research points out the variegated textures of black civic exertion in both literary and political terms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uiowa.edu/oai:ir.uiowa.edu:etd-8121 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Creators | Piper, Gemmicka F. |
| Contributors | Hill, Michael D., 1971-, Thaggert, Miriam |
| Publisher | University of Iowa |
| Source Sets | University of Iowa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright © 2015 Gemmicka F. Piper |
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