Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction

Black Women Writing under Segregation

2024
•
Author:

Eve Dunbar

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 women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating these writers’ radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar demonstrates how they offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s 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 women’s 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 people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these midcentury women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

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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, 1930–1940.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Radical Satisfaction of Black Women’s Monstrous Work

1. Ugly Work: Alterity and the “Ugly Work” of Black Life

2. Home Work: Black Domestic Liberation

3. Domestic Work: Dangerous Workers and Black Sociality

4. Line Work: Human–Nonhuman Crossings and New Routes to Black Satisfaction

Coda: The Revenant

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index