Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Rafia Zafar

Katherine Clay Bassard. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 183 pp. $42.50 cloth/$16.95 paper.

The field of early African American literary criticism finds itself in flush times. Beginning with the publication of contemporary benchmarks such as Frances Smith Foster's Written by Herself and William L. Andrews's To Tell A Free Story, the once small group of scholars writing on those authors active before 1900 has grown into a diverse company. In fact, the study of the earliest decades of African American literature may represent the fastest-changing face of our scholarship. A recent and felicitous study in this realm is Katherine Clay Bassard's Spiritual Interrogations. Undertaking the study of "pre-Emancipation" black women's religious writings, Bassard calls her work on African American female intertexuality a "spiritual interrogation," following the locution of religious and political essayist Maria Stewart. As Bassard says of her endeavor, "The sense of a dialogue between metadiscursive realms--between different 'worlds' we might say--for the purpose of both self-empowerment and communal political en gagement informs this book." To read Bassard is to find oneself at the edge of the next wave of African American literary criticism.

Bassard's tasks are multifold and overlapping, mirroring, in many ways, the rhetorical and performative strategies she brings to light in the works of such early African American women authors as Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson. Exegetical goals Bassard sets for herself include the investigation of intertexuality among these earliest black women writers, the interrogation of an Atlantic diasporic subjectivity that arose "post-Departure" and "pre-Emancipation" (to use the expressive terms she does), the returning to a primary place the role of spirituality in African American literature, an understanding of the ways in which the performance of a New World African culture both encompasses and bypasses current notions of syncretism, and the mapping out of further directions for African American literary criticism in the twenty-first century. These are big tasks. Yet by and large Bassard delivers on her promises, presenting the reader with new and thought-provoking material.

One can say that, of all early African American authors, Phillis Wheatley--along with Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass--would be the most in danger of being studied to a fare-thee-well. Bassard's close readings of two of the best-known Wheatley poems --"On Being Brought From Africa" and "To the University in Cambridge"--demonstrate that there is much left to discover in these seemingly well-known verses. She does not stop there, however, and goes on to argue convincingly for Wheatley's elegies as a reworking and working-through of her own post-Middle Passage psychology. I found particularly intriguing the author's discussion of the Shaker Rebecca Cox Jackson's self-fashioning against lay preacher Jarena Lee and the still-young A.M.E. establishment, a male-centered dominion that had been challenged not long before by a younger Lee. Here too I found excellence in Bassard's nuanced interpretations.

Particularly worthy is Bassard's call for an Africanist, diasporic viewpoint that insists that race, in and of itself, was not the sole characteristic around which early black communities in the United States constructed themselves: "The purpose of African American culture in the pre-Emancipation period was not to accommodate Africans to slavery but to help them be more than slavery demanded." In the performance of that culture--through the creation of poems, journals, and autobiographies that drew on a "spirituals matrix"--black American women and their relations survived and created literature, music, the very meaning of life. Here, precisely, lies the significance of spiritual communities built and maintained by these earliest of our authors. Such black women may not always have concurred in their religious paths--Bassard takes care to illustrate the ways these writers do diverge and challenge one another--but it was in their similar spiritual convictions that they could and did create community.

Few missteps occur in Bassard's thoughtful analysis. If one could suggest an expansion at all, it would be to ask for a greater engagement with some of the current discussions about religious culture in nineteenth-century African American women's studies (I think here of Carla Peterson's "Doers of the Word" and of Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent, even though the latter's chronological time frame postdates Bassard's). Certain sections, such as the chapter on Ann Plato, would have gained from a more extended textual critique. Since Bassard reads literary works well, it is understandable that we readers would want more.

With Spiritual Interrogations, Bassard contributes much to the conversation in early African American literary studies. Pointedly, her afterword calls for our secularized criticism to heed the spiritual messages from the past; twentieth-century authors such as Morrison, Baldwin, and their kin, she reminds us, have not forgotten the importance of religion. Theoretically sophisticated and textually driven, Bassard's significant book gives us insight into the many and diverse layers of pre-Emancipation African American literature.