Review: Lynette Goddard. Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance.

Abstract

Staging Black Feminisms reflects a direct influence of the theoretical framework established by lesbian feminist Barbara Smith. Twenty years after the publication of her controversial 1978 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Smith reflected that she “was influenced by the bold new ideas of 1970s lesbian feminism” (Truth That Never Hurts, 3) when she expressed her displeasure with the cultural illiteracy of white scholars, heterosexist blind spots and general homophobic impediments in African American literary scholarship. The recognition of a Black women’s literary tradition was yet emerging and Smith insisted that the establishment of a Black feminist framework was primary for an adequate critique of Black women’s art. Smith challenged her contemporaries to develop a criticism that “would owe its existence to a Black feminist movement while at the same time contributing ideas that women in the movement could use” (11). While much advancement has been made towards that end in American literature studies, Lynnette Goddard shifts our attention to similar flaws in an arena of Black British women’s art.