Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers by Barbara Christian

19 essays written from 1975 by Barbara Christian, Associate Professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, including “The Dynamics of Difference: Review of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider”, and “No More Buried Lives: the theme of lesbianism in Audre Lorde’s Zanzi, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” “Some of the important contributions that the emergence of the lesbian theme has made to Afro-American Women’s literature are: the breaking of stereotypes so that black lesbians are clearly seen as women, the exposure of homophobia in the black community, and an exploration of how that homophobia is related to the struggle of all women to be all that they can be—in other words to feminism. . . In their different ways, these four Afro-American women writers, lesbian and non-lesbian, relate lesbianism and feminism. . . Walker and Shange challenge society’s definition by presenting women’s communities that are sexually and economically independent of men...Walker, especially, demonstrates how sisterhood among women benefits the entire black community, Lorde and Naylor underscore the many death-obstacles—silence, malice, guilt, violence—that society places in the way of lesbian relationships that might develop into such communities.”