Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing under Segregation

(Paperback)

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Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American womens writings in the 1930s1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black womens satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging.

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black womens capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black peoples quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black womens completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

Author Bio

Eve Dunbar is the Jean Webster Professor of English at Vassar College. She is author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World and coeditor of African American Literature in Transition: 19301940.