Reconstructing Womanhood by Hazel Carby

In this work, Hazel Carby challenges the dominant narratives of African-American cultural history and its pattern of black women writers in order to include urban confrontations in fiction. Carby starts by laying the groundwork and acknowledging the black, feminist scholars and critics who have preceded her. Then she re-examines antebellum racial and gender relationships, especially questioning the ideal of womanhood. She reads both Northern and Southern antebellum texts, including Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before moving on to such authors as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Iola Leroy), Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Pauline Hopkins. Utimately Carby identifies a renaissance in African American literature during the turn of the twentieth century, and complicates the tradition of African American fiction to consider its previously neglected engagement with the struggles of the urban working class. I thought this book was very neatly assembled, and its readings of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (the part I was looking to read, and the one I am most qualified to assess) were quite sharp.