In “Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels,” UO Assistant Professor of English Courtney Thorsson takes a new view of African American nationalism through the history of African American fiction writing by women.

She asserts that the modern body of that literature moves beyond the Black Arts movement and employs cultural nationalism – the belief that people of African descent in the United States have a unique and separate culture – in the form of women’s work practiced by the novels’ main characters.

“We tend to think of black cultural nationalism as a movement that happened in the black power era of the 1960s and ’70s among men writing plays and poetry in northeastern cities,” Thorsson said.

But as she read novels by Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison – a group of authors who all appear in the “Norton Anthology of African American Literature” and are regularly taught in both survey and specialized courses – she says she noticed that these authors were revising the gender, genre and geography of black cultural nationalism.

“In the same era when literary scholars were thinking in transnational terms like the Black Atlantic or the Global South, these authors hang on to the somewhat unfashionable idea of nation,” Thorsson said. “’Women's Work’ is an exploration of why cultural nationalism continues to matter in novels by African American women in the 1980s and ’90s.”

Thorsson explores five forms of women’s work that represent nation in the novels: organizing in Bambara’s “The Salt Eaters”; cooking in Shange’s “Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo”; dancing in Marshall’s “Praisesong for the Widow”; mapping in Naylor’s “Mama Day”; and inscribing in Morrison’s “Paradise.”

In “Paradise,” for instance, Thorsson sees the act of inscribing. She writes, “In order to account for the obscured, hidden, and erased female writings in ‘Paradise,’ I read inscription, as opposed to interpretation, as a key form of women’s work in the novel.”

Thorsson says her critical approach to “Paradise” helps students think through the notorious ambiguity of Morrison's fiction.

“I have always meant ‘Women's Work’ to be the kind of resource that an undergraduate tackling a term paper will find productive in terms of both content and methodology,” Thorsson said.

In referring to Naylor’s creation of fictional homeland island Willow Springs in “Mama Day” as a form of mapping, Thorsson writes, “Rather than follow readers who interpret Willow Springs as a nostalgic portrait of segregated space or as primarily an argument for African American autonomy, I investigate the way this island redefines space beyond its geographical boundaries, constructing home as a portable concept that replaces the nation-state as a route of identification.”

And in “Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo,” Thorsson writes the act of cooking and family recipes are a way to “define cooking as a practice of an African American cultural nation. Recipes in particular celebrate women’s bodies, invite participation, pass on personal and familial history, and make imagined travel possible.”

She says the chapter will be “especially useful for the growing number of students on the UO campus doing work in food studies.”

Thorsson encourages UO students to think about African American women as they represent themselves in literature.

“We need not be limited by the ways white authors, filmmakers and television producers portray black women since we have plenty of works in which black women speak for themselves,” she said. “Why, for example, watch the film, ‘The Help’ when we could be reading Septima Clark’s and Ella Baker's own stories of participation in the Civil Rights Movement in oral histories and recent biographies of both women?”

Or, she adds, when we could look at the ways African American novelists portray women organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping and inscribing all as self-determined practices of individual and communal identity.

“It is in this everyday women's work, both ordinary and extraordinary, that these real-life women and fictional characters define and practice identity,” Thorsson said.

- by Aria Seligmann, UO Office of Strategic Communications