Scribblings with Green Chalk

With question 2, I’d like to look at Black feminist bloggers as a community sharing aims and ideas. I wrote earlier about the blog persona. This is not a “sub-section” or addendum to that post. I would like to use the ideas I outlined there to ask about the online Black feminist community and its culture.

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the myths informing the literature of the African diaspora. Can we talk about a reservoir of concepts and stories shaping and binding Black feminists’ online spaces?

Do Black feminists and womanists see themselves as tricksters, offering subversive knowledge, criticism from an epistemologically privileged (important) perspective? Is that a mission or an ethical perspective shared among them/you?

There are several academic Black feminists and womanists who do not necessarily take the tone of instruction, but inscribe the question of knowledge and the search for it very visibly into their blogging objectives. Referring to the academia is not just a statement of interests but a speaking position, it seems to me, one presupposing a principled interaction, sometimes also applying a hierarchy, though the particular rules are up to the blogger.

The Angry Black Woman does not rely so much on the teacher persona but on the strength encoded in a stereotype she uses to her advantage on the blog. She best describes it herself:

A couple of years ago during a discussion of confrontations and how people handle them, I advised a friend that he needed an Angry Black Woman to resolve his conflicts for him. After all, Angry Black Women have advantages certain others don’t.

Firstly, ABWs are angry. Anger won’t solve most of the world’s problems, but it will get people who play at being aggressive and dominant to back down quickly. Second, ABWs are black. And we know that most white people are scared of black people. Third, ABWs are women. So, if the person you’re in conflict is a man, isn’t backing down from the anger, and doesn’t flinch at going toe to toe with a black person, being a woman is really useful. He can’t hit you, you’re a woman. If he does, he’s an abuser. If he calls the police on you, they’ll exclaim “You’re frightened of a woman? Grow a set of balls and leave us alone!” Thus, Angry Black Women have the advantage in almost all conflict situations.

(Read more here.)

Mnemosyne makes use of the figure of the Greek titaness, the embodiment of memory who gave birth to the Muses (and thus comes before them), to mark her blog’s non-literary orientation and her focus on “what i and other marginalized people have to say, than how we say it.”

There are, of course, many other ways of self-representation. One of them is focusing on the content and objectives of the blog rather than self-characterization. Ann of Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters provides a mission statement on the “About” page without any self-description. Aulelia, a young African journalist in the UK, doesn’t use a mythic persona, but instead outlines her background, her beliefs, presents her artwork and photographs of herself.

The imagery and avatars that appear on the blogs are an important aspect of the personae. Photographs place the writer as a person of flesh and blood and in almost tangible surroundings (there is a suspension of disbelief, no one reacts automatically suspecting inauthenticity). Do illustrations then suggest detachment or increased distance between blogger and reader? What to make of them?

I am not going to try to bring the above observations together. I’m asking here about common threads and would like to hear some ideas on that. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.