Claudia Tate – författare

The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak of the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

In Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, Claudia Tate uncovers the political significance of black women's domestic fiction in the post-Reconstruction period. Tate's cultural analysis draws upon a broad range of texts, including ante-bellum works such as Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, domestic fiction by Pauline Hopkins, Katherine Tillman, and Angelina Weld Grimké, and modernist classics such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the centre of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate''s examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine''s happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans'' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

Although psychoanalytic theory is one of the most important and influential tools in contemporary literary criticism, to date it has had very little impact on the study of African-American literature and culture. Now, Claudia Tate argues that psycholanalytic paradigms can produce rich readings of African-American desire, alienation, and subjectivity. Tate summarizes the work of such figures as Freud and Lacan, with references to their contemporary literary proponents, and examines a series of texts by Emma Kelly, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. This provocative new book will serve as an introduction to psychoanalytic theory and its application for African-American literature and culture. Tate strikes unchartered territory, and her work will be of great interest to scholars and students in African-American studies.

“Black women writers and critics are acting on the old adage that one must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard.” —Claudia Tate, from the introductionLong out-of-print, Black Women Writers At Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century. Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks. Alexis Deveaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olson, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margret Walker, and Shirley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art.Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.