The African American Literature and Culture Now Symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.

Panel #2: Black Feminisms in the Archive

Courtney Thorsson
"The Sisterhood, Literary Organizing, and The Archive"

A 1977 photo of "The Sisterhood,” a writers' group in New York in the late 1970s that included June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker has circulated as a source of inspiration since it was first published in 2004. This paper tells the story of a research journey from that photo to my book manuscript, The Sisterhood and Black Women's Literary Organizing. Taking my project as a case study, I consider the possibilities and challenges of engaging archives of contemporary African American literature. This paper describes a number of Black Feminist research methods including simultaneously constructing and using archives, engaging Black women writers across genres as theorists, rendering women's work visible, and grappling with loss.

Erica Edwards
“Extraliterature and the Black Feminist Imperative”

This paper begins with the assumption that post-1968 Black feminist writing is a field through which to approach the questions of periodicity, history, and materiality that have animated recent studies of African American literature. I begin by juxtaposing two well known textual moments that expand literary capacity and, at the same time, destabilize the relationship between literature and knowledge at the very moment that Black writing finds its institutional home in the American academy: Shange’s “bring her out/to know herself/to know you” (c. 1974) and Morrison’s “Sth. I know that woman” (1992). Offering these two
sentences/confessions/pleas/ songs as extratextual, extraliterary actings (actings-out?) that perform a certain outwardness or extra-ness, I move on to discuss the extraliterary imperative that guides June Jordan’s 1979 play, The Issue, and Gloria Naylor’s 2005 fictionalized memoir 1996. The extraliterary forms that crowd around the play, on one hand, and the memoir, on the other hand, demand what I want to call, after Greg Thomas, a “literacy of outlaws,” a reading practice that indicts the contemporary critic's position within literary institutions and, at the same time, generates occult forms of knowledge that the critic can access, although not unprobematically, not exclusively, and not without risk.


Courtney Thorsson is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon, where she teaches, studies, and writes about African American literature from its beginnings to the present. Her book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels (Virginia 2013) argues that Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism in their novels of the 1980s and 90s. Her essays have appeared in Callaloo; African American Review; MELUS; Gastronomica; Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society; Contemporary Literature; and Public Books. With the support of a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Professor Thorsson is completing a book on Black Women's literary organizing in the 1970s.


Erica R. Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she holds the Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature. She is the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. She is the co-editor of Keywords for African American Studies, published in 2018 by NYU Press. Edwards is the recipient of many prestigious fellowships and grants, most recently having completed a residency at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as differences, Callaloo, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Black Camera.