Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation

In this piercing study, Dunbar (Black Regions of the Imagination), an English professor at Vassar College, explores how the Jim Crow–era fiction of Black women authors envisioned what it would look like to feel fulfilled “outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.” Examining Ann Petry’s sympathetic representation of sex work in her 1946 novel The Street, Dunbar argues that brothel madame Mrs. Hedges’s refusal to conform with “socially condoned forms of labor” serves to refute the cultural norms of whiteness. According to Dunbar, Dorothy West’s 1948 novel The Living Is Easy imagines the female-led household as an empowering alternative to heterosexual marriage by following protagonist Cleo Judson’s quest to convince her sisters to move in with her without their husbands. Elsewhere, Dunbar suggests that Alice Childress’s 1956 short story collection Like One of the Family “illustrates how American power structures saw the presumption of dignity among Black domestic workers as a threat,” and explores how Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1953 novel Maud Martha pushes back against the racist conflation of Black people and animals. The sharp analysis illuminates how mid-century Black writers challenged white conceptions of the good life, and Dunbar concludes with a moving tribute to Breonna Taylor that doubles as a reminder that “Black women cannot wait for utopic conditions to find their satisfaction.” Edifying and incisive, this impresses. (Nov.)