Race, Place, Space, and the Construction of Black Womanhood

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

“Place” and “space” are important factors when considering ideas of racial identity, progress and community. Physical sites hold symbolic value as markers informing strategies of resistance and survival, as well as the pursuit of pleasure and liberation. The presentations on this panel of Rutgers and Howard University Ph.D. students emphasize the important cultural, spiritual, intellectual and materialist value of diverse physical spaces and places in constructions of black womanhood. Kaisha Esty examines how post-Emancipation black women reformers sought to purge rural settlements of one-log cabins, a widely regarded danger to the survival of black women and family life. Arlisha Norwood explores how unmarried black women navigated post-Civil War Virginia and how their lives revealed communal concepts of femininity, sexuality, and dependency. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reveals the ways black women both created their own spaces for Civil War commemoration, but also directly confronted white women’s dominance in this space in the post-Civil War South. Finally, Marlene Gaynair traces how the West Indian Day Carnival in Brooklyn transformed into a space where black female sexuality and performances of identity and culture are widely accepted. Together, Esty, Norwood, Lawrence-Sanders, and Gaynair will all argue that black women’s uses of physical places and spaces as sites of constructions of black womanhood, independence, and sexuality are essential for understanding the complex nexus of “race, place, and space.”

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Wanda Hendricks, University of South Carolina

Individual Presentations

• "Women without Men: Single African American Women in Post Civil War Virginia" - Arlisha Norwood, Howard University

• "She wiggled her body in the most suggestive and obscene manner...” West Indian Carnivalesque and the Public Performance of Black Womanhood, 1947-1971 - Marlene Hyacinth Gaynair, Rutgers University

• "Making Memory and Making Freedom: How African American Women Created and Contested Civil War Memory" - Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, Rutgers University

• “The One Room Log Cabin is a Pestilent Menace to Decent Living:” Uplifting Black Womanhood Across Rural Settlements - Kaisha Esty, Rutgers University

Commentator

• ASALH Audience, .