Abstract
Passable is an examination of Black and leftist women's writing at mid-century that attends to how certain women writers—Alice Childress, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Meridel Le Sueur, and Anne Moody—strategized feminized covers for radical identities and messages in their writing and lives. Leaning heavily upon the word "passable" for its simultaneous meanings of mobility and mediocrity, Passable traces apparently unremarkable writing for its circulatory capacities. Examining how working-class women's everyday discourse has functioned as a site of Black Liberationist and feminist subversion, Passable analyzes texts that have been overlooked because of their attachment to women's and domestic work—realms of solidarity and discourse that have been wrongly regarded as politically acquiescent and intellectually inferior. As analysis of writing activity that holds a tenuous relationship with the academic discipline of literary studies, Passable examines the historical contexts of the Cold War U.S. that contoured the professionalization of literary studies and, in turn, the metrics we still adopt to assess and describe literary work. Due to these implicit politics, literature as a field remains incapable of properly interpreting radical Black feminist writers and those they inspired.
Committee Chair
Rafia M. Zafar
Committee Members
William J. Maxwell
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English and American Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
Winter 12-15-2020
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/vfz6-jd89
Author's ORCID
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0916-2781
Recommended Citation
Kelling, Meredith Leigh, "Passable: Black Feminism, Working-Class Activism, and Reproductive Labor in Mid-Century American Writing" (2020). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 2585.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/vfz6-jd89