“Written, published, … cross-indexed, and footnoted”: Producing Black Female Ph.D.s and Black Women's and Gender Studies Scholarship in Political Science

Abstract

In an essay entitled “Variations on Negations and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” Black feminist Michele Wallace explores the difficulties of producing and presenting a “black female cultural perspective, which for the most part is not allowed to become written in a society in which writing is the primary currency of knowledge” (Wallace 1990, 54). Although she anticipates that some might find a defense of Black female cultural and political criticism “elitist,” she nevertheless remains, “convinced that the major battle for the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ [i.e., Black women] will be to achieve a voice, or voices, thus inevitably transforming the basic relations of dominant discourse. Only with these voices—written, published, televised, taped, filmed, staged, cross-indexed, and footnoted—will [Black women] approach control over [their] own lives” (66).