Community and Critique

The Rhetorical Activism of Black American Women's Memory Work

Sara C. VanderHaagen

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781643366128, 9781643365466
• eBook ISBN: 9781643366135
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How Black American women have uplifted Black communities and critiqued dominant white memories

In Community and Critique, Sara C. VanderHaagen analyzes Black women's memory work, a deliberate, public effort to create, preserve, revise, and circulate accounts of the past to strengthen community bonds and effect change. VanderHaagen draws from the resources of rhetorical studies, public memory studies, and Black feminism to examine key examples of Black women's memory work during the critical historical period between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. These instances include public addresses about exemplary women, speeches given at the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women, the 1923 campaign against the "Black Mammy" monument that was proposed for creation in Washington, DC, and the 1926 biography collection, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. Responding to a call by Black feminist scholars to move beyond recovery toward deeper engagement with Black women's intellectual and rhetorical work, Community and Critique centers the memory work of Black American women to demonstrate the significant, if underexamined, role that they played in shaping our shared past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• COMMUNITY AND CRITIQUE
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• ONE “To Embalm Her Memory in Song and Story”: Charting Black Women’s Community and Critical Memory Work
• TWO “To Strive by Their Example”: Invoking Exemplary Women in Public Speech
• THREE “Self-Emancipating Women”: Commemorative Critique by Black Women Speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women
• FOUR “The Shadows of the Past”: Black Women’s Commemorative Stewardship and the Demise of the “Black Mammy” Monument
• FIVE “Planting Good and Joy Instead”: Cultivating Community Feelings in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction
• Epilogue: Abundance, Memory, Risk
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index