Page 131 →Epilogue
Abundance, Memory, Risk
It was 1863, in the depths of the US Civil War and the dawn of emancipation. Sarah Woodson addressed fellow educators assembled for a meeting of the Ohio Colored Teachers’ Association. An Ohio native and 1856 graduate of Oberlin College, Sarah Woodson (later Early) taught at Wilberforce University and would eventually address the crowds at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women. Her 1863 speech, “Address to the Youth,” exhorted young people to pursue education and intellectual development. As I described in chapter 3, Woodson regularly addressed White audiences and cooperated with White women in her national temperance work, yet the lion’s share of her advocacy invested in Black communities—especially schools and churches. Moreover, Woodson inherited a commitment to Black nationalism from her parents and older siblings (she was the youngest of eleven) that powerfully shaped her approach to her communities.
Woodson’s reflections on history in this 1863 speech manifest her Black nationalist commitments and attest to the significance of community memory work. Although she lamented the lack of historical records featuring the “brave and noble” of her people, she theorized how education might reveal great deeds of the past and produce great deeds in the present:
If you take a retrospect of the past, you perceive that in the darkest periods, when truth and virtue appeared to sleep, when science had dropped her telescope and philosophy its torch, when the world would have seemed to be standing still, the inscrutable wisdom of Divine Page 132 →Providence was preparing new agents, and evolving new principles, to aid in the work of individual and social improvement.
It would appear as if the world, like the year, had its seasons; and that the seed disseminated in spring time, must first die before it can vegetate and produce the rich harvests of autumn. The developments of one period seem obscured for a season, by the unfolding of the great mysterious curtain, by which to disclose the glories of the next.1
Woodson reassured her audience that “new agents,” “new principles,” and “developments” were waiting to be revealed as the years unfolded. Using familiar farming and light–dark metaphors, Woodson reasoned that deeds done in the past and yet unknown may emerge at some future time, just as deeds done in obscurity in the present may also emerge in their season of fruitfulness. She recognized that stories from the past may be stored like seeds in some other place, by some previous people (or Providence), waiting for a time when they might blossom again. Although she did not speak explicitly of Black communities here, Woodson’s audience and record indicate that she had them in mind.
Woodson’s words also seem to reach out from the past and point to those of another Black woman writer, Maya Angelou:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise [. . .]
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave [. . .]2
In her poem “And Still I Rise,” Angelou deployed the same seed and soil metaphors to communicate her vision of persistence and flourishing. Angelou’s poem also weaves together both community memory (“the gifts that my ancestors gave”) and critical memory (“your bitter, twisted lies”), showing their intimate connections. Both Woodson and Angelou perceived the potentialities of Black memory and its ability to persist through time. Utilizing cultivation metaphors, both women also emphasized the patience and care required of those tending to memory work.
While I was working on this book, journalist and scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones became the face of Black women’s critical memory work. Page 133 →Hannah-Jones has often been reduced to a lone figure seeking to correct whitewashed historical narratives, but her work has been collective, both within her temporal moment and across historical periods. Referring to herself in her social media profiles as “Ida Bae Wells,” Hannah-Jones pays homage to the journalistic pioneer Ida B. Wells, a Black woman who likewise used her role to advance a cause significant to Black people: changing public opinion and laws about lynching. Hannah-Jones’s work on the New York Times’s “1619 Project” garnered her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. The landing page of her website prominently features this statement: “I see my work as forcing us to confront our hypocrisy, forcing us to confront the truth that we would rather ignore.” Using the words “forcing” and “confront” twice each in this short sentence communicates Hannah-Jones’s commitment to critical memory work. Her investigative journalism, opinion writing, speaking, podcasting, and social media engagement likewise evinces this approach. Both Hannah-Jones and her collaborators perform critical memory work that, to borrow Houston Baker’s words, “judges severely, censures righteously, renders hard ethical evaluations.”3 Her projects directly and deliberately seek to correct mainstream—typically White and male—narratives about the past. She intentionally invokes the memory of Black women who preceded her, including activist journalists such as Wells.
Women such as Hannah-Jones have made incredible strides in shifting Black people toward the center of the conversation about public memory in the United States. Without downplaying the work of such women, we can also note that White discourse in the United States frames them primarily as critics. They are consistently typecast (and sometimes caricatured) in that role, portrayed as brash debunkers of false histories. Such a position can be rhetorically expedient, as it goads opponents and rallies sympathetic allies to the cause. However, it also dramatically limits the public legibility of the other forms of building and theorizing that contemporary Black women memory workers do. Hannah-Jones’s transition to the professoriate supplies a notable example. After being offered a position at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), Hannah-Jones was not granted tenure upon hire. UNC subsequently reconsidered their decision and offered tenure to Hannah-Jones, who then turned it down in favor of a position in the journalism department at Howard University.4 Hannah-Jones has noted of her time at the prominent historically Black university, “I feel like we come from a collective community that understands that our own individual success is insignificant if everyone else around us is suffering.” The Howard Hilltop student newspaper article went on to note that Hannah-Jones Page 134 →“credits all of her success to her community and people who came before her and fought for the rights that she now benefits from.”5 Hannah-Jones’ critical memory work is most visible to the US public, but her community work is equally significant.
I draw together these two examples of Woodson and Hannah-Jones to highlight the historical continuity of Black women’s memory work from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. Both of these women were driven to public address and activism by a desire to serve Black communities and advance their interests through education—in particular, historical education. Both of these women were also cognizant of the power of dominant memories and the necessity of challenging them. I read them together, just as I read the case studies in this book in conversation, to explore how certain features of Black women’s memory work have persisted and evolved over time. I also read these cases through the Black feminist tradition to explore and, as Ashley Hall put it, “identify a certain kind of continuity between the rhetorical strategies that Black women employ in the past and the present, collapsing linear configurations of time and space predicated on white humanity and Black death.”6 I view the memory work of Black women like Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, Hallie Quinn Brown, Maude Nooks Howard, Beatrice Cannady, Nikole Hannah-Jones and many others as a continuous, evolving tradition nourished by the similarly evolving tradition of Black feminist thought. By bringing these rhetorical practices together across time, the analysis in this book also responds to Kent Ono’s call for enriched intersectional rhetorical analyses. Ono argued that, in addition to intersectional rhetorical analyses that examine multiple identities and axes of marginalization, “There is a need [. . .] for diachronic and vertical thinking in intersectional analysis, as well—that is, chronicling a group and groups across time and era.”7 This book has chronicled the memory work of Black American women from Reconstruction into the New Negro Movement, showing a coherent yet far from monolithic set of rhetorical practices attuned to these Black women’s own intersectional experiences.
This book deepens understanding of the memory work of Black American women by developing a more robust representation of their rhetorical efforts in that field. Rather than focus only on critique, this book has examined memory work that builds community, advances critique, and combines the two. I have also shown how rhetorical efforts to shape our shared memories constitute a form of activism. In some cases, Black women’s memory work lays the groundwork for future activism—whether by providing clubwomen experience in organizing or by theorizing about Page 135 →the role that history ought to play in the work of liberation. Memory work also provides a respite from activism by sustaining Black communities through positive stories about their ancestors or cultivating affiliative community feelings. In other cases, the memory work is activism—as when leaders such as Mary Church Terrell and the members of the PWYWCA published their written protests of the proposed “Mammy” monument. The cases examined in this book thus demonstrate that memory work can serve as a key feature of the rhetoric of social movements. The remainder of this epilogue outlines some of the things I learned while writing this book, which I believe holds value for readers who are interested in Black women’s rhetoric, memory, history, and related fields. Specifically, I focus on what this book taught me about rhetoric’s abundance, memory’s meanings, and the critic’s risk.
Rhetoric’s Abundance
This book is nourished by rhetoric’s abundance and pluralism, seeking to integrate theory, criticism, and historical research. I undertook this book from an understanding of the rhetorical critic’s work that resonates with Kirt Wilson’s “functionalist” approach to what he calls “theory/criticism.”8 Wilson argues that, in such an approach, “the purity of a theory or the authority of any critical practice is less important than what they do and how they accomplish what they do.”9 Rather than reduce the work of rhetorical criticism or the rhetors themselves, this understanding expands both by framing rhetorical criticism as the process of opening a text or set of texts. Angela G. Ray articulated something similar in a 2016 essay on the “state of the art” of rhetorical criticism. She described the field to which she was initially attracted as “riotously profligate in its object focus,” and she further noted that specialization within that field “is the basis for abundance in a pluralistic enterprise.”10 These conceptualizations of rhetorical criticism envision the work of the critic as expansive, abundant, creative—all values I have worked to inhabit as I wrote this book.
Completing this project convinced me that a functionalist understanding of rhetorical theory and criticism can open our perspective to the creative use of rhetoric in various contexts. A functionalist perspective is beneficial for those interested in expanding understanding of the rhetorical activities of marginalized rhetors, such as Black women in the United States. As Ronisha Browdy reminds us, “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s) is disruptive, resistant, alternative, and creative because it has to be.”11 I examine “traditional” texts of public address, such as speeches; I also look to less Page 136 →studied examples such as biographical sketches. Drawing on this variety of texts expands the range of what might be considered rhetorical activities, especially when engaged by less dominant groups. Examining a body of texts including public speeches, opinion pieces, petitions, biography collections, and even fictionalized newspaper editorials demonstrates the myriad ways that Black women used the rhetorical tools at their disposal to advocate for the kinds of memories that they believed would nourish their communities and fuel their public advocacy.
Examining a variety of texts also demonstrates the abundance of Black women’s rhetorics more generally. Although they have not often seemed abundant, Black women’s rhetorics have “been here,” as scholars such as Olga Idriss Davis and Browdy have shown, whether or not the broader field of rhetorical studies has acknowledged them.12 This book is not a project of recovery or inclusion but an effort to center Black women as agents of knowledge, as skillful rhetors, as powerful theorists, and as sophisticated memory workers. This book contributes to the field of Black women’s rhetoric(s) that Browdy has staked out, as well as to the field of rhetorical studies more broadly. Although I have sometimes been encouraged to do so, my primary goal is not to show how Black women have used the same strategies as White rhetors or to show, through sustained comparison, how their rhetoric contrasts with that of rhetors who are not Black women. Rather, it is to read Black women’s rhetorics within their own theoretical and historical contexts, relying on methods derived from Black feminist thought and Black women’s experiences. Doing so secondarily enhances our understanding of humanity in all its complexity. As Browdy has explained, “Multiple awareness of the truths of Black womanhood, as well as awareness of the hateful acts and reasoning for destroying those truths, are often vocalized within Black Women’s Rhetoric(s). These multi-conscious and multi-voiced representations are a part of what allows this work to speak across, and be useful to, multiple and mixed audiences.”13 Learning about Black women’s memory work can benefit people across social positions and categories. The pluralism of rhetoric here intersects with the multivocality of Black feminist thought to yield an abundance of insight.
Memory’s Meanings
This book also advances scholarship on rhetoric and public memory by (re) introducing the concept of memory work and developing the supporting concepts of community and critical memory work. I have found memory work to be a more capacious and critically generative term than public Page 137 →memory, which can be both naggingly nebulous and oddly exclusive of nondominant rhetorical forms. Although the unique contours of community and critical memory work emerged from examining Black women’s rhetorics, I believe that these concepts may also be applicable in other contexts, with some adjustment.
Four additional insights on memory have continued to return to me as I’ve worked on this project. First, studying this variety of texts through the lens of Black feminist thought enabled me to see the equal importance of community memory work and critical memory work. Although I think that examining one or the other is certainly a valid and sometimes necessary intellectual choice, it seemed that the texts themselves and the rhetorical efforts of Black women required that any analysis acknowledge their equal commitment to nourishing Black communities and advancing critiques of Whiteness. Indeed, as Hine and Squires (among others) have noted, often those two goals work together.14 Thinking about both community and critical memory work also provides an opportunity to consider the role of the audience. The texts examined in this project addressed fellow Black women, White women, Black men, and interracial audiences. These rhetors astutely adjusted their claims and arguments to disarm preexisting prejudices, which were numerous. The texts in this book show both the individual rhetorical skill and collective rhetorical activism that Black women were engaging in during this time period. The fact that these women presented their memory work differently, depending on the audience, furthermore demonstrates how their rhetorical savvy not only applied to traditional rhetorical aims but also was animated by broader purposes.
Second, reading these rhetorical texts alongside Black studies treatments of memory and Black feminist scholarship enabled me to think more holistically about the affective dimensions of Black women’s memory work. The rhetoric of Black women examined in this book makes it clear that they understood that their representations of the past were shot through with important, sometimes conflicting, feelings. They lamented how they could be “disheartened” by history’s “seasons of darkness,” and they celebrated the “pleasure” that could be had when reading about the lives of “self-sacrificing heroines.”15 They did not eschew negative or positive emotion but embraced affective tension, and they did so in ways as varied as the women themselves. Thus, reading these texts also supports the claims advanced by contemporary scholars such as Badia Ahad-Legardy and Christel N. Temple that Black memories include traumatic experiences but are not defined by them.16
Page 138 →Third, reading these texts revealed how Black women memory workers theorize their relationship to and experience of time. Across the speeches, biographies, and petitions, Black women in the United States exhibited a keen awareness that time could and should be rhetorically manipulated to better reflect their reality. Black women during Reconstruction, for example, spoke of the importance of education to reconstruct a Black past that had been obscured by enslavement and White supremacy. Black women during the 1890s redefined “progress” to account for both the deprivations of enslavement and the inestimable potential of educated and organized Black womanhood. Black women during the early twentieth century—the height of lynching and anti-Black violence—saw their present as intimately connected to their future, which positioned the audience for their memory work as not only their contemporaries but also generations to come. Much of the memory work described in this study insists on the right of Black women to determine their own temporalities and, often, to do so in ways that emphasize connections among past, present, and future. Through these rhetorical manipulations of time, Black women theorize about temporality in ways that resonate with the arguments of philosopher Charles Mills and rhetoric scholars Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek.17 Mills calls for an “oppositional racial chronopolitics” that contests White time by identifying itself with “historical narratives that also seek to explain the present and stake particular claims on the future.”18 Ore and Houdek specifically highlight the “role of Black women as those who push the countertemporalities of Black life, healing, and struggle into the public arena, and in doing so demonstrate what it means to breathe in times of suffocation.”19 Listening to the voices of these Black women of the past demonstrates how they, too, participated in articulating new temporalities that centered themselves and, in some cases, countered “suffocating” White time. Black women memory workers are theorists of time.
Fourth, Black women used these self-defined temporalities to theorize that collecting memories could combat erasure and serve as a storehouse from which future generations could draw to enable their activism. Although much memory scholarship emphasizes that public or collective memory is driven by present concerns, attention to Black women’s rhetorical activities demonstrates that memory work is also animated by futurity. Many of these women seemed to recognize that their rhetoric would not find a large sympathetic audience in their present; indeed, some of them clearly stated that their rhetorical efforts were primarily oriented toward the future, as Hallie Quinn Brown did in her sketch about Harriet Tubman Page 139 →in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction.20 In a sense, the storehouse of memory built by Black women inverts what Paul Ricoeur described in Memory, History, Forgetting as “forgetting held in reserve.”21 His analysis does not attend closely to the power dynamics inherent in this particular memory process. However, if we were to do so, we might think of this process from two perspectives: from those enforcing the “forgetting” and from those stewarding the “forgotten” memory so that it will not be completely erased. At the risk of oversimplifying, in this case, White America forgets the Black past; Black women remember it. It is important to remember that this storehouse of Black memory is not always primarily a critique of White hegemonic memory but a tool for survival and thriving in Black communities.
A Critic’s Risks
Finally, I want to reflect on how writing this book has changed me, as a critic and as a person. Only a few short years after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the summer of 2020, many of us White Americans put away the Black Lives Matter signs we carried in protests, left behind the little black boxes and hashtags in our social media feeds, returned to our segregated spaces, and became consumed once again with our individual lives and the work of processing the trauma of a global pandemic. I, too, have struggled with the desire to give up the pursuit of justice and instead give in to despair and exhaustion. However, writing this book enabled me to persist in both risk and reflection, challenging me and fortifying me during this singular historical moment. It expanded my thinking about how we in the United States engage with African-American history, Black feminism, and the struggle for racial justice more broadly.
This book has been, for me, a continual invitation to the risks inherent in collective learning and collective struggle. It is a risk for me—a tenured White female scholar working at a predominantly White institution in a city where almost forty percent of my neighbors are Black—to write a book about the rhetorics of Black women.22 The ethical demands of this book have obligated me to venture into new “contextual fields,” as Kent Ono calls them and which I outlined in the introduction. Ono explains that “a contextual field may be the theory or theoretical field one uses to understand a text, the synchronic social-cultural context surrounding a text, or the diachronic history or genealogy that either anchors or situates the text temporally in some way.”23 This study has required me to engage with the Black feminist tradition more deeply, including reflecting on how I, as Page 140 →a White feminist scholar, should learn from this intellectual tradition and thereby do greater justice to the texts and voices of Black women. I have wrestled with the concept of intersectionality to understand what it might mean for a White feminist scholar to engage in intersectional analysis without performing something akin to what Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo called “drive-by” race scholarship.24 I have learned about womanist biblical interpretation and Afrocentric perspectives on memory and mythology. I have confronted the unsettling idea of a politics of refusal while interrogating my own education in a politics of recognition. Spending more time in these contextual fields is a risk as an “outsider,” as a graduate student once described me in relation to my work. For as Ono reminds us, “doing deeply contextual work requires risks, risks of being found naïve, risks of offending members of groups about which one has no expertise.”25 Try as I might to avoid such outcomes, I cannot eliminate them. Such risks are, admittedly, different in both degree and kind from those faced by my colleagues of color, queer colleagues, disabled colleagues; yet they are risks, nonetheless. I have learned that doing this work “means opening oneself up to being evaluated by others and possibly being found to be inferior. Doing such research means being vulnerable; in being vulnerable in the face of others, a tremendous change in the world is possible.”26 In the midst of this imperfect and vulnerable work, I take heart from bell hooks’ exhortation in Teaching to Transgress: “If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate.”27 I am certain that I have done this work imperfectly, and I am grateful for those willing to engage it in its imperfection.
More than anything, this book has been an opportunity for me to think through how we as human beings contextualize—but do not erase—traumatic experiences as we renarrate our pasts so that they do not paralyze us but, rather, enable us to continue acting. At times, the grief of the world and its relentless injustice felt like too much piled upon my own personal grief. I have also felt buried beneath heartache upon personal heartache, even as I, alongside others, have navigated the larger lamentations of environmental degradation and rising authoritarianism and collective pandemic trauma and racial injustice. While I was working on this book, I faced the death of a close friend, the loss of a child through a disrupted adoption, ongoing infertility, a confrontation with yet more broken systems through the adoption of our second child, and the separation from my local faith community. However, I didn’t lose any close friends or family to COVID-19. I Page 141 →had housing, work, food, a support system, and access to health care. Writing this book has been, in many ways, an exercise in hope that has kept me afloat in the midst of grief, both personal and global. Although writing this book has buoyed me, I hope even more that the stories and voices amplified here will challenge and lift others as well, whether directly or indirectly. This book is about rhetoric and memory work; it’s also about much more.