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Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject

Name: Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject
Author: Kevin Everod Quashie
ISBN: 9780813533674

by Kevin Everod Quashie

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Overview

Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the "girlfriend" as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem that language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes. The analysis throughout this book interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies.

Synopsis

Quashie (Afro-American studies, Smith College) argues that Black women's cultural production during the past 30 years has influenced and been influenced by the debates and discourses that characterize contemporary cultural theory, especially the notion of identity. Their poststructure, he says is the idea of the girlfriend, an oscillating identificatory process between self and other, a Black feminist idiom of subjecthood. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR