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He speaks for whom?: inscription and reinscription of women in 'Invisible Man' and 'The Salt Eaters.' - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism

MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Ann Folwell Stanford

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5. Although Minnie Ransom is drawn from a tradition of African American female healers and "spiritual adepts" (as Bambara would put it), I think the character type may be in danger of being over-used in contemporary African American women's fiction, and appropriated as a stereotype by readers looking for simple, untroubling niches into which these characters might be placed.

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Works Cited Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1981. Benston, Kimberly. "Controlling the Dialectical Deacon: The Critique of Historicism in Invisible Man." Delta (April 1984): 89-103. Bluestein, Gene. "The Blues as a Literary Theme." Massachusetts Review Fall 1967): 593-617. Byerman, Keith. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: U Georgia P, 1985. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 1903. Rpt. Millwood, NY: Draus-Thomson, 1973. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. NY: Vintage-Random House, 1972. --------."Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar." Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes 1940-1962. Ed. Herbert Hill. NY: Knopf, 1963. 242-90. Gates, Henry Louis, jr. "Introduction." Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, jr. New York: Penguin/Meridian, 1990. 1-20. Greene, J. Lee. "Ralph Ellison." Fifty Southern Writers after 1900. Ed. Robert Bain and Joseph Flora. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1985. Harris, Trudier. "From Exile to Asylum: Religion and Community in the Writing of Contemporary Black Women." Women's Writing in Exile. Ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1989. 151-169. Henderson, Mae. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Gates, Reading Black, Reading Feminist. 116-142. Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988. Hooks, Bell. Ain't I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1981. Hull, Gloria. What I Think It Is She's Doing Anyhow: A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters." Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table P, 1983. McDowell, Deborah. "The Changing Same': Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists." New Literary History 18.2 (1987): 281-302. Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Omaha: U Nebraska P, 1965. 5-24. Smith, Valerie. "Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the 'Other."' Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 38-57. Loopholes of Retreat: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Gates, Reading Black, Reading Feminist. 212-226, Traylor, Eleanor W. "Music as Theme: The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara." Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. 58-70. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1987.

He speaks for whom?: inscription and reinscription of women in 'Invisible Man' and 'The Salt Eaters.' - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism

MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Ann Folwell Stanford

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