The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen
"The Other Reconstruction" examines groundbreaking works
by three African American women whose writings expose the economic,
political, and social factors that sustained race violence in
post-Reconstruction United States. Their works demonstrate that
fixed representations--of race, gender, and class--are a
prerequisite of tolerated interracial and intraracial violence. Ida
B. Wells-Barnett's works challenge the "lynching
narrative" and reveal that this violence depended upon the
personal and political silence of women. Angelina Weld Grimke's
short stories critique class-based strategies of Negro advancement
as they expand conventional conceptions of race violence. Nella
Larsen's novels explore the problems of cultural fixity. These
writers' examination of the potential violence of fixed
representations informs later acts of cultural expression as well
as future liberation struggles. (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford
University, 1996; revised with new preface, bibliography, and
index)
