Troublesome Reading: Story and Speculation in African-American and African-Originated Women’s Writing. Resurrecting the Past, Re-imagining the Future

Abstract

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) Maya Angelou’s I know why the Caged Bird sings (1969) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) rewrote the silenced histories of African-American women’s lives, troubled complacent reading practices, and permanently changed the landscape of what, why and how readers engage with writing. Their work challenges scant, received knowledge and views on Black women’s lives through forms of experimentation which revive and revalue folklore and folk expression, oral storytelling, music, and the worth of the imaginary, in the form of the supernatural. Latterly these forms have been further developed by Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due who, like Morrison in particular, use the power of the speculative to imagine forwards into other ways of being, through Afrofuturism. This essay begins with the excitement and the troublesome reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I know why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It situates their work briefly in the fascination with testimony, ‘a little black pain undressed’ (Burford 1987, 37) then articulates the contested, and heady moments of critical challenge to the fixed canon and to the middle class white women’s writing and reading practices which then dominated feminist criticism. The essay opens up the ongoing effects of reading these works and examines the critical reception from interests in postcolonialism, issues of gender and challenges to heteronormativity, and investigates the effectiveness of music and the supernatural as elements in the work. It considers the Afrofuturist rewriting of controlling tales, the magical possibilities of Nalo Hopkinson’s work in Falling in Love with Hominids (2015) and Tananarive Due’s recovery of the hidden musical history of Scott Joplin in Joplin’s Ghost (2005) and of lost histories and potential futures in Ghost Summer (2016).