Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Magali Cornier Michael

My location of feminism as offering a means of thinking about coalition in other than dominant modes is not arbitrary. Consciousness raising as developed during the Women's Movement in the 1960s and 1970s reflects a tradition of coalition work that has been effaced from or simply ignored by dominant conceptualizations of coalition. Catherine A. MacKinnon describes consciousness raising as a "feminist method and practice" that involves "a face-to face social experience that strikes at the fabric of meaning of social relations between and among women and men by calling their givenness into question and reconstituting their meaning in a transformed and critical way" (171). While varying significantly in member makeup and group dynamics, consciousness-raising groups tended to "value nonhierarchical organization and a commitment to confronting sources of inequality" (166). In addition, consciousness raising involved using participants' "own feelings and experiences as women" (Sarachild 490) as the means to explore social inequities. Feminist consciousness raising thus conceptualized coalition in terms of a form of communal critique that was not purely abstract but rather was heavily dependent on material experiences and the realm of emotions. The potential weaknesses of consciousness raising, however, included a tendency to homogenize the group members, to look solely at sexual inequities--rather than examine the interconnectedness of sex, race, class, sexual orientation, and age--and to over-focus on individual growth-thus reinforcing the Western emphasis on individualism and, by association, the accompanying structures of domination. In response to these problems, more recent feminist scholarship emphasizes a "response through coalition" that is based on "affinity, not identity" and thus emerges "out of otherness, difference, and specificity" while remaining "fully political" (Haraway 155)--i.e., engaging culture and the power relations that create and are perpetuated by the various systems that make up a culture. I n slightly different terms, Mouffe argues that "political identity" is always "something to be constructed, not empirically given" and thus based in "commonality, in ethico-political bond that creates linkages among the participants" ("Democratic" 75-76). Indeed, the idea of coalition is in the process of being reconfigured by many feminist scholars in terms of "what we want to achieve" rather than "in terms of 'who' we are," a move that creates space for differences while not losing the idea of a "common political stance" (Yuval-Davis 4).

Moreover, other forms of coalition traditions besides predominantly white feminist ones have been left out of dominant conceptualizations of coalition, including the historical practices of "othermothering and community othermothering" that Stanlie James argues "have been critical to the survival of Black communities" in America (51). African-American communities have been forced to develop other means of survival given the legacy of slavery and continuing racism, both of which have contributed to the disruption of African-American families and communities and a lack of accessibility to the dominant forms of power. One of these mechanisms of survival has entailed the development of othermothering, a form of "cultural work" (44) and communal "intervention" (51) that engages nurturing as a vital means of addressing specific needs resulting from concrete social, political, and economic inequities. Nurturing and caring activities, usually associated with biological mothering and the private sphere, thus become tr ansformed into larger social practices with socio-political implications. As cultural work, othermothering does not simply take place within an already existing, static African-American community but, rather, involves the ongoing construction through localized coalition processes of an African-American community that makes possible and values othermothering.