Black Feminism

Student’s Name

Supervisor’s Name

Course Name

Due date

Black Feminism Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers explore how she (Hartman) saw “Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe” as probing the writing of the human rather than feminism in a discussion celebrating Spillers’ “Mama Baby, Papas Maybe.” Hartman reminds us of Sylvia Wynters, a Jamaican humanist critic who forces us to consider Spillers’ concerns in relation to Wynters’.We can point out some ideas that were presented in “Mamas Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, which were similar to those ideas in Wynters, “Beyond Miranda Meetings” Utilizing and analyzing, the ideas of Spiller and Wynter, We can better grasp the “human” in Hartman’s perspective and evaluate Spiller’s “ungendering” and Wynter’s nullification” of individuals from historical records will be compared, as well as their approaches to such ideas.

Sylvia Wynter exclaims her input in “Beyond Mirandas Meanings’ on ontology. She speaks about ontology in conjunction to how it played a role I “The Tempest.” The Tempest tells a story about how the whites encountered another race in accordance to my perspective. On page 365, Wynter introduces the word “ontology”, which defines to be the study of being. She takes ontology and relates it to how the ontology of gender (women) was absent of Caliban’s Woman, completely nullifies the aspect of woman of Caliban’s origin, subliminally, objectifying them and dehumanizing them totally. Winter also mentions that Miranda the daughter of Prospero, a female and the Tempest gave her qualities that recognizes and un-alienated Miranda as a woman.

Spillers does not stop to speak of Black women and men if she claims in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (2003b) that chattel enslavement suspended the conventional understandings of gender for slave women and men by rejecting the possibility of patriarchal kinship connections. Her notion that Black life was unfettered throughout the Middle Passage does not take her to a pure realm of Blackness free of Western grammatical contamination. There’s something more complicated going on here. Fanon’s often stated “masculinism” or insensitivity to “gender” can be said to be the same. Comparing to spinner there is a fruitful engagement with Wynter’s understandings of feminism, gender, and patriarchy as it relates to the overrepresentation of Man and decolonial feminisms in her work. Second, the authors look at how she articulated the studiua humanitatis, and by extension literature, as a critical site for radical transformation and liberatory imagination. Wynter’s critique of mainstream liberal feminism has provided a language for dismissing the concerns expressed by and work produced by women of color, while also highlighting the deep resonances between women of color’s substantive contributions of feminisms and Wynter’s overall project.

Sylvia Wynter coined the terms “demonic” and “dialectic” to describe both the distinctiveness of Black Feminist and what introducing the figure of the Black woman can and does do to the dominant feminism ideology, feminism interpreted through a “consolidated field” (S. Wynter 1990: 357). Wynter’s usage of the terminology is strategic, starting with the term “demonic,” which has multiple meanings. Wynter begins by describing her After/Word as coming from “demonic foundations” (356) that work outside of mainstream feminist “current governing system of meaning, or theory/ontology”. Physicists have proposed that a demonic schema acts “beyond the space-time orientation of the homuncular spectator.” Miranda’s demonic ground is a field of ambiguity, unclear of what it may become, and black feminism operates with this demonic schema, acting outside Miranda’s meaning.

Similarly they both argue that over time, women of color and decolonial feminists, activists, and writers have made significant contributions to the development of a communal and decolonial politics that seeks to bolster, strengthen, heal, and transform racialized relationships rather than focusing solely on our relationship with “Man.” To that end, we will highlight not just the attention to and political organization around the systemic oppression of men of color by women of color and decolonial feminists, but also their/our efforts to (re)value women of color’s lives beyond a decontextualized “partriarchal discourse.” Slavery’s arrangements, according to Spillers, are passed down from generation to generation, even if they are disguised by “symbolic substitutes.” “African-American female’s ‘dominance’ and ‘strength’ come to be viewed by following generations–both black and white, strangely enough–as a ‘disease,’ as a tool of castration,” she writes. The mother’s failure is viewed as the father’s absence and its prospective impacts on his children (particularly his male children). This systemic rupture between the black female body and basic parts of womanhood (motherhood and sexuality) also creates a gap between white feminist fights and black feminist fights. Spillers ends with a call to “claim monstrosity” and its radical possibilities for black female liberation, rather than seeking inclusion in the feminist agenda.

For both Wynter and Spillers, the coordinates of the systemic violence of colonialism and slavery as it has stretched between the French Caribbean of Martinique and Northern Africa (Wynter), the English/Spanish Caribbean of Jamaica and Cuba (Spillers), and the United States are mapped out by Wynter and Spillers (Spillers). Economic greed and an ideological humanism whose referent was never universal, but implicitly and explicitly wedded to forms of life “the West” had naturalized, the European powers (and later, the United States) invented blackened spaces around the world that became sites of value extraction necessitated by economic rapacity and an ideological humanism whose referent was never universal, but implicitly and explicitly wedded to forms of life “the West” had naturalized. Wynter, as French and British colonized subjects, respectively.

In conclusion, for both Wynter and Spiller the figure of the black woman, her ontological being, disrupts and throws a challenge into the feminism field, which is already consolidated. It presents a new subject with her own problems; this is a subject who, since she is demonic or derives from demonic origins, is both unknown and unclear in terms of the outcome of her introduction. As a result, the black Feminist endeavor becomes ambiguous, and her accent shifts as she begins to express from the hushed ground from which she originated, articulating another voice. Through the intersectional lens of racism, sex, and gender, Black feminism has been able to introduce the silenced voices outside of the universal category of ‘Woman.’ This was an accomplishment that dominant feminism was unable to accomplish because it denied and refused to acknowledge the presence of these repressed voices.

Work Cited

HJ Spillers, (1994). Mamas baby, papas maybe: An American grammar book.