Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color

By Channette Romero

Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of color—including Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko—Channette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novel’s disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813933306

Book preview

Activism and the American Novel

Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color

Channette Romero

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Romero, Channette.

Activism and the American novel : religion and resistance in fiction by women of color / Channette Romero.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3328-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3329-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3330-6 (e-book)

1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Politics and literature—United States—History—20th century. 5. Religion in literature. I. Title.

PS374.W6R66 2012

813.009'9287—dc23

2012011805

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Searching for Relations

1. Reconstituting the Public Sphere

2. Spiritual Temporalities and Histories: Cristina García and LeAnne Howe

3. Rewriting America’s Exceptionalism: Toni Morrison

4. Post–Civil Rights Community: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ana Castillo

5. Indigenous Sovereignties: Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich

Conclusion: Toward a Literary Activism

Notes

References

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of the intellectual rapport, mentoring, friendship, love, and support I received while writing it, and I am indebted to all who made it possible. Three extraordinary mentors deserve my most profound gratitude: Marianne DeKoven, who served as director of the project at its dissertation stage and has always supported me; Barbara McCaskill, who epitomizes what a mentor and public scholar should be; and Nancy Peterson, a much-admired scholar who has become a dear friend. Their encouragement, guidance, and generosity are models for lived feminist/womanist praxis. I owe them a debt that I can never repay.

Other mentors, colleagues, and friends supported me through the writing process. Heartfelt thanks are due to John McClure, Daphne Lamothe, and Renée Bergland, who read early drafts of the project and offered invaluable advice. I am also indebted to Christy Burns, who was foundational to my intellectual and feminist growth. My sincerest thanks to my friends and colleagues in English and Women’s Studies at Union College and the University of Georgia. There are too many to name them all, but I would be remiss if I did not thank Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ed Pavlic, Valerie Babb, Susan Rosenbaum, Tricia Lootens, Doug Anderson, Harry Marten, Jim and Carol McCord, and my fellow junior colleagues in the trenches, especially Chloe Wigston-Smith and Cynthia Camp. My students at the University of Georgia also aided in the writing process; our engaged class discussions helped me to clarify my argument, and the project is better for it. Among my friends and colleagues at other universities, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Angela Mullis, and Anthony Lioi are especially appreciated for expanding my thinking in innumerable ways. I would also like to thank LeAnne Howe, Jace Weaver and Laura Adams Weaver, and Daniel Heath Justice for their support of my writing and teaching.

The support I received from a Willson Center Research Fellowship and a Sarah H. Moss Fellowship from the University of Georgia, along with Humanities Development Grants from Union College, were indispensable to this project. A portion of chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form as "Creating the Beloved Community: Religion, Race, and Nation in Toni Morrison’s Paradise." Reprinted from African American Review 39.3 (Fall 2005). A portion of chapter 5 appeared in an earlier form as "Envisioning a ‘Network of Tribal Coalitions’: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead" in American Indian Quarterly 26.4 (Fall 2002), and is reprinted here with the permission of the University of Nebraska Press. I greatly benefitted from the helpful comments made by both journals’ anonymous reviewers.

Thanks also to Cathie Brettschneider, my editor at the University of Virginia Press, and Tim Roberts, the managing editor at the American Literatures Initiative, for their support of this project, as well as their professionalism. I am indebted to the anonymous readers for the Press; their thoughtful and insightful revision suggestions helped to strengthen my argument.

I owe special thanks to my dearest friends and family; without their support this book would not have been possible. Brian Norman has been a model for the kind of scholar and person I want to be. Justina Allocca-Conte’s unfailing friendship and support have been invaluable. Leslie Boby-Sabatinelli and Dean Sabatinelli saved me from myself when writing made me crazy. Aidan Wasley and Kim Kersey provided weekly encouragement, advice, and laughter. I am especially grateful for my family’s support throughout the writing process; it meant more than I can express.

Chris Pizzino deserves the greatest thanks and appreciation. He tirelessly read numerous drafts, helped me refine and clarify the project’s intellectual stakes, and offered invaluable patience and support. This is a stronger book because of him.

Introduction: Searching for Relations

In Wendy Rose’s poem Notes on a Conspiracy (1993), an American Indian spirit expresses outrage when her skeleton is disturbed and excavated for museum display. She begins searching for relations beneath each rock, / praying that I will not go to war alone (86). Writing by women of color since the 1980s has increasingly utilized spirits and other beliefs held by people of color to envision spiritually inspired relations, political alliances that collectively resist injustice. It is important to note that the war these alliances engage in Rose’s poem and related writing does not involve armed struggle, but conflicts among different ideologies. Gloria Anzaldúa remarks, Our revolution is fought with concepts, not with guns, and is fueled by vision (Preface 5). Works by Rose, Anzaldúa, and other women writers of color have increasingly turned to the religions and spiritualities of people of color to provide them with visions and ideologies that differ from those of the dominant cultures of the Americas. These writers show how the ritual practices and beliefs of Indigenous, Diasporic African, and syncretic sacred traditions, such as Vodun, Santería, and Candomblé, can be used as the basis for imagining different forms of community.

A sea change is occurring in literature by contemporary women of color. Nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century writing by women of color historically focused on distinct cultural identities and communities; however, fiction by women of color since the 1980s increasingly imagines interracial political alliances (relations) that connect different peoples. Recent novels by women of color examine the responses of multiple communities to colonialism in North and South America. They rediscover forgotten, spiritually inspired alliances and interracial revolts involving Africans, Natives, indentured Asians, and European colonists.¹ This new fiction mines interracial history, searching for historic relations among different peoples that can act as models for contemporary political engagement. Critical of a widespread disengagement from political and civic participation, and also of the contemporary novel’s disconnection from politics, this new fiction attempts to create a transnational and politically conscious reading public. The project, expressed in a variety of ways, is to deprivatize reading, to use it to inspire social critique. This politicized fiction offers itself as a means to re-create the public sphere, a space of public debate and dialogue that is critical of state power. The novel form’s historic connection to the public sphere is appropriated in an effort to engender a fuller democracy than that envisioned by the concept of nationalism. The religions and spiritualities of people of color are also deployed, as they contain rich histories and models of political engagement. Fiction by women of color since the 1980s enlists the political potential latent in novels and the belief traditions of people of color, seeking to inspire readers with visions of resistance to injustice.

To examine the rich history of the beliefs of people of color and their relationship to political activism, I have avoided the terms historically used to discredit the beliefs as folk superstitions and magic. Instead, I have chosen to use the terms religion and spirituality to describe people of color’s understandings of the sacred. I use the term religion to foreground the many beliefs that are organized in specific theological systems and ritual practices, like Vodun and the Black Church. I use the term spirituality to describe those forms of sacred consciousness and ethics that may or may not be linked to specific religious traditions and rituals, such as beliefs in an animate natural world and in ancestor spirits. My use of the terms religion and spirituality together to describe the differing beliefs of people of color is somewhat unusual. Religious studies, ethnic studies, and feminism have long drawn a careful distinction between these two terms. This binary was initially created to analyze and differentiate ideas about the sacred, and it is not without bias. Vine Deloria Jr. argues that the explanatory categories used in studying religious phenomena have been derived from the doctrines of the Christian religion (284). Unfortunately, this has resulted in many religions being held in deep contempt because they do not in some manner measure up to the definitions of religion as promulgated by Western/Christian ideas of the nature of religion.…American Indian tribal religions are among those so down-graded (75). While we might argue that the contempt Deloria discusses is no longer evident in religious study, we unfortunately have not yet fully changed our tools of analysis, choosing to continue to differentiate certain religions (often monotheisms) from spiritualities (often the beliefs held by Natives and other people of color).

Of course, we may have switched our motivations for asserting the religion/spiritual binary. The 1970s ethnic nationalist movements upheld a rhetoric of difference, seeking to promote pride in the culture and beliefs of people of color, especially those explicitly marked as being different from those of mainstream U.S. society. Feminists of color in the 1980s further upheld this rhetoric of difference to distinguish (and privilege) the decentralization of power found in spiritualities from the institutionalized hierarchies of monotheisms that are labeled religions. At the time, this distinction was politically and culturally advantageous. Akasha Gloria Hull describes how, in the early 1980s, spiritual functioned as a word the black women I associated with started using to denote all the unseen avenues to power that enabled us to withstand the pernicious racism-sexism-classism-heterosexism of our daily existences (52). However, the power gained from such oppositionality can only be temporary as it is rooted in a reactionary understanding of difference that keeps unchanged the initial bias against the beliefs of people of color.² Such differentiation and privileging of spirituality create inaccuracies and missed opportunities. Scholarship that views all religions only as oppressive monotheisms that condone racism-sexism-classism-heterosexism and all beliefs of people of color as anti-oppressive ignores the progressive politics practiced by some monotheisms. Similarly, this binary denies the way some beliefs of people of color currently are used to uphold oppressions (like the stigmas associated with homosexuality at some Vodun and Native places of worship). The distinction created by the religion/spiritual binary erases key differences among the beliefs of people of color and threatens merely to replace certain privileged beliefs with others.

Unfortunately, rhetorics of difference often repeat, rather than fully disrupt, hierarchies.³ To disrupt the religion/spiritual binary, we should consider these terms’ relations to each other, rather than juxtaposing them hierarchically against each other. By labeling liberation Catholicism, the Black Church, Vodun, and Santería all religions, I seek not only to reveal the complex organization of these traditions’ beliefs and ritual practices, but also to critically examine the commonalities and differences among them. My methodology emerges from the literature itself. The contemporary fiction I examine uses the sacred traditions of people of color as the basis for envisioning political alliances with the power to cross hierarchies and boundaries among communities, ideologies, and theologies. I urge us as scholars to follow suit, to enact disciplinary practices and uses of terminology that also contain the possibility of enacting social transformation. What possibilities and transformations might become possible if we examine differences and commonalities among communities and belief systems, if we give up the tightly held differentiation between the religious and the spiritual?

Though my book traces a growing trend in fiction by women of color since the 1980s, texts by men of color, especially American Indian male writers, also reflect a renewed focus on religion and spirituality.⁴ However, literature by male writers of color often describes how an individual male protagonist experiences the conflict between his cultural community and mainstream society.⁵ The way sacred traditions are portrayed in contemporary novels by women of color, as communally practiced and produced, disrupts the focus on the individual found in the majority of literature by men of color.⁶ Because my book is concerned with the relationship between literature and communal practices (like religion and politics), and because critics often dismiss women’s spiritual narratives, I have chosen to focus on texts by women of color.⁷ The writers whose works I explore attempt to spark debate about the connections between literature and religion, and about the novel’s potential to inspire political consciousness. Fiction by women writers of color since the 1980s has begun to create a more communal framework for exploring these issues.

Asserting Interracial Activism

One way to understand the change in writing by women of color since the 1980s is to measure the distance between two well-known anthologies, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and its sequel, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002). What is notable about the first groundbreaking volume is that it brings together writings by women of color that critique the racism of the U.S. feminist movement and call for a separate feminism for women of color. The volume opens with Donna Kate Rushin’s The Bridge Poem, which begins:

I’ve had enough

I’m sick of seeing and touching

Both sides of things

Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

.............................................

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world. (xxi)

Rushin uses a bridge metaphor to express anger over the way feminists of color are treated as tokens, used to give the U.S. feminist movement an appearance of inclusivity. Coeditor Cherríe Moraga clarifies the bridge imagery in her preface to the text; she describes a room full of white feminists who wait for the few feminists of color to analyze racism and the solutions to it, rather than proactively trying to understand and resist racism themselves. Moraga writes, "How can we—this time—not use our bodies to be thrown over a river of tormented history to bridge the gap.…I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection (Moraga and Anzaldúa xv, italics in original). Rushin, Moraga, and the other contributors to the volume critique the way they have been forced to bridge the gap among feminists and among cultural communities, leading Moraga and her coeditor, Gloria Anzaldúa, in their introduction to express the commitment of women of color to our own feminism" (xxiii, italics in original). The assumption of This Bridge Called My Back was that separatism was necessary to aid women of color in raising their own and others’ political and feminist consciousness.

By 2002, the needs of women of color had changed, a change that is reflected in the second volume’s inclusion of literature by white women and men of all races together with writing by women of color. Tellingly, the image of the bridge has a positive connotation in the second volume; it expresses a desire to build more inclusive communities. Anzaldúa, an editor of both volumes, urges her 2002 readers to creat[e] bridges that cross race and other classifications among different groups, doing away with demarcations like ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ (Preface 3, 4). Anzaldúa warns readers to guard against creating new binaries through racial separatism, because staying ‘home’ and not venturing from our own group comes from woundedness, and stagnates our growth (3). Instead, she urges her readers to build bridges between races: To bridge is an act of will, an act of love, an attempt toward compassion and reconciliation (4). This focus on racial reconciliation is the noteworthy result of social changes that occurred between the publications of This Bridge’s first and second volumes; Anzaldúa observes that twenty-one years ago we struggled with the recognition of difference.…Today we grapple with the recognition of commonality within the context of difference (2). A larger social recognition of difference has occurred since This Bridge’s 1981 publication, leading Anzaldúa to move away from a separatism based on difference toward the recognition of commonality.

It was precisely the success of the first anthology that made the new stance of its sequel possible. This Bridge Called My Back’s advocacy of a politics of difference laid the foundation for third-wave feminism; it showed readers the importance of recognizing how interlocking systems of oppression (like race, class, gender, and sexuality) affect women of color differently than they affect white women, or men. Since its publication, considerations of race, class, gender, and sexual difference have become common approaches in both feminist activism and literary study. This Bridge Called My Back represents a moment when literature helped to enact larger social changes by transforming readers’ consciousness and approaches to reading literature. The poems, stories, and essays included in the anthology taught readers they were not meant just to be read, but to be considered and their calls for change perhaps enacted. In her foreword, Toni Cade Bambara declares: "Quite frankly, This Bridge needs no Foreword. It is the Afterward [sic] that’ll count…The work: To make revolution irresistible" (Foreword viii). This Bridge Called My Back asserted a literary activism, an irresistible revolution in words. By introducing new approaches in both feminist activism and literary study, it joined a tradition of protest literature in American letters,⁸ and provided a salient example of literature’s potential for inspiring social change.

Like its predecessor, This Bridge We Call Home is emblematic of (and advocates for) another major shift in American literature. Because of the impact of This Bridge Called My Back, its sequel no longer has to advocate for a recognition of difference; instead, surprisingly, it promotes recognizing commonalities that cross difference. The sequel does not collapse or deny differences based on race, gender, or culture, but suggests that recognizing them does not preclude also seeing common interests and using those interests as the basis for social change. Anzaldúa tells her 2002 readers that they must look beyond the illusion of separate interests to a shared interest, and that doing so will help us to form an intimate connection that fosters the empowerment of both (nos/otras) (Now 572). We empower ourselves by recognizing shared interests and commonalities that cross difference. When we imagine ourselves as separate, isolated victims, social problems continue and we deny the power we possess to change them. Anzaldúa urges readers to move from focusing on what has been done to us (victimhood) to a more extensive level of agency (Preface 2). To enact social change, we must move beyond separatism and victim status toward a broader understanding of agency and collective power.

Several contemporary women writers of color echo Anzaldúa’s shift from racial separatism toward interracial inclusivity. bell hooks urges us to rethink our definition of community: For too long we have conceptualized the Black community in narrow terms. We conceptualize it as a neighborhood that is all Black, something as superficial as that. When, in fact, it seems to me that it is by extending my sense of community that I am able to find nourishment (hooks and West 91). hooks suggests that notions of community organized along racial lines are superficial, that community is possible only by expanding our notions of how we relate to others. Anzaldúa and hooks are joined by many contemporary women writers of color who share the belief that true community is available only by widening our relationships beyond the racial and national borders that divide us. Cristina García says, I am interested in going beyond the Cuban model and rebel[ling] against the whitewashed version of Cuban history that I grew up with to see what other places have suffered (Irizarry 186, 181). García, Anzaldúa, and hooks are joined by many other women writers of color who increasingly move from texts focused solely on the identities and issues affecting their specific cultural communities toward increased recognition of commonalities affecting multiple peoples in the Americas. These writers urge their readers to broaden their notions of community and to value the potential of interracial alliances.

What factors have contributed to this shift toward interracial inclusivity? Caroline Rody argues that it emerges from global communication and trade and from mass immigration to the United States post-1965, creating, not by intent, but by inevitable byproduct, a multiplication of human encounters, across ethnic differences and antagonisms (4). Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination (2009) examines the shift toward cross-cultural engagement in Asian American literature. She suggests it reflects an urge to admit those differences into the center of one’s imaginative life, even into one’s self-conception, and ultimately produce[s] shifting and surprising new compositions of the ‘we’ (4, 8). Rody insightfully notes the trend’s efforts to expand our personal and collective identities. In the fashion of Rody’s argument, I want to suggest something further. The new literature is not simply trying to broaden our notions of identity, to close the gap between the self and a global world. The literature is also trying to address a much more traumatic gap between the promise of democracy and the lived reality of oppression. The gap between nation-states’ promises of equality and many nations’ oppression of women and people of color was justified by narratives of nationalism. Writing by women of color has begun using the sacred beliefs of people of color and their interracial interactions as a way to resist these false narratives (what García calls whitewashed history) and the oppressions they seek to elide.

In particular, this movement toward interracial interdependence occurs as a reaction to and movement away from the 1970s ethnic nationalist movements, like Black nationalism, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement. A number of women of color became politically and socially conscious after participating in or being influenced by the 1950s and 1960s activism of the U.S. civil rights movement. For example, Alice Walker describes how participating in the civil rights movement brought about knowledge of my condition that felt like being born again, literally (In Search 121, 125). The political consciousness of women of color was further developed by participating in or reflecting on the activism of the second-wave feminist movement and the ethnic nationalist movements of the 1970s. Though many women of color benefitted from the political consciousness and rich organizational knowledge learned from this activism, they decried the way these movements marginalized their experiences as a result of racism, sexism, and heterosexism.

Angered that their experiences were not fully recognized or valued by these movements, some women of color began to create spaces where their knowledge and experiences were more valued. They forged consciousness-raising groups and began writing politicized literature that foregrounded the rich knowledge of the lived experiences of women of color. Several key texts emerged from this moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s that became highly influential in later literature and theology by women of color. In addition to This Bridge Called My Back (1981), texts like Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1977), Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984), and many others sought to teach readers lessons learned from the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. While the individual lessons varied, they contained a key similarity—recognition of the multidimensionality of oppression. As Audre Lorde succinctly states in her 1982 speech Learning from the 60s (reprinted two years later in Sister Outsider): There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives (138). Because the lives of women of color are negatively affected by intersecting systems of oppression (like race, class, gender, sexuality, nationhood, etc.), efforts to resist that oppression must move beyond restrictive identity politics toward a multidimensional approach.

Literature from this period encouraged women of color not to imagine themselves through single-issue lenses, like woman or Asian (or Black or Indian, etc.), but as third-world feminists or women of color. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty note: We were not born women of color, but became women of color in the early 1980s after learning that racism against African American people was distinct, although connected to racism against Chicano, Native, or Asian peoples (xiv). Chela Sandoval describes how this period of writing and activism by women of color became an insurgent social movement that demanded a new subjectivity that recognized differences while strategically identif[ying] common grounds on which to make coalitions (58, 52).⁹ The long-term effects of this social movement are evident in the increasing movement toward interracial inclusivity in contemporary women of color’s literature.

The Theology and Spirituality of Women of Color

The 1970s and 1980s women of color movement not only had a profound effect on women writers of color, but also on women theologians of color. While some of these theologians, like Arisika Razak, describe being active participants in the ethnic nationalist and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Razak 102), others describe the extended influence