Race Women's Aesthetics as Liberatory Presentism: Literary and Photographic Experiments in the Black Clubwomen's Movement Newspaper

• In Event: Liberatory Experiments: Art as Black Feminist Praxis

Abstract

African American women activist-artists at the end of the nineteenth century launched an expansive, grassroots movement that was supported by an official organ called The Woman's Era. The Woman’s Era was a national periodical published for Black women by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin in Boston in the late 19th century. Through poetry, fiction, and experiments with portrait photography, the contributors and editors of The Woman's Era crafted an aesthetic tradition rooted in their commitment to the mantle of race womanhood, which centered their public performance and political organizing for racial pride and respectability through Black feminist praxis. Art movements for Black liberation often center Black world-making that is (Afro)futurist, transforming current genres and mediums to imagine what liberation will or could look like for future Black peoples. This paper considers the ways Black clubwomen model presentism in their pursuit of self-liberation from expectations that they erase or suppress tensions between the performativity of their race womanhood and their interior lives. I argue that presentism is an important frame for rejecting the historical devaluation of these aesthetic experiments because of the ways it allows Black feminist liberatory praxis to come more clearly into focus and power, over and against male-dominated New Negro futurism and becoming as the aesthetic standard.

Author

• Brandi Locke, University of Delaware