Frontmatter and Editorial

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial: 

But some of us are brave: all the women are white, all the blacks are men -  this anthology title for the collection edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and the late Barbara Smith, first published in 1982, summed up the concerns black women's writing in the 1970s and 1980s had put on the political, cultural and literary agenda, ever since the groundbreaking publication of Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman in 1970. Pointing to the suppressions and negations of both, white feminism and black liberation and their discursive constructions of subjectivity, agency and a potential for resistance, writing by black women had created a powerful moment of social and cultural awareness which reverberates - even though in many contexts rather as an underground existence - until today and has been resurfacing in the contemporary interest in and attraction of theories of intersectionality. However, despite the noticeable current regard for the crossroads or interconnected axes of analysis framed by race, class, gender and sexuality though, the particular generative power of black women's writing as the crucial impulse to that critical development has, beyond the African-American context, gone missing. With a selection of contemporary criticism, this issue of gender forum wants to draw attention to the manifold contributions of black women's writing both to a cosmopolitan literary and cultural heritage of women, as well as to international Gender Studies.