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Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction; Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History.
In the twenty years since the publication of Barbara Christian's pioneering Black Women Novelists, the study of African American women's writing has seen significant growth. Subsequent discussions have furthered Christian's work by considering the dominant culture African American women write within and against. Venetria K. Patton's Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction and Janet Gabler-Hover's Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History continue in this mode. With varying degrees of success, these works demonstrate how African American women writers engage with writings by white American women and, in doing so, redefine and reconfigure representations of race and gender in the American cultural imagination.
In Women in Chains Patton examines seven texts by African American women whose representations of maternity "seem emblematic of a traceable legacy of slavery and gender conventions" (xv). While previous scholarship has analyzed separately the various elements of motherhood in each of these texts, Women in Chains becomes an important resource illustrating the continued interrelationship of slavery, gender, and maternity in the lives of African American women by compiling them in a single work. Beginning with a discussion of attempts by slaveowners to "degender" African women, Patton asserts that slave women drew upon the practices of traditional matrifocal African societies and the labor demands of slaveowners to reconstruct gender roles so that African American women were considered mothers, and thus women. Though she is careful not to overstate either the presence of African survivals in African American culture or the egalitarianism of traditional African societies, Patton substantiates that nineteenth-century African American women's gender representations were informed by African cultural concepts that recognized the centrality...