Text

theses

To novelists, short story writers, poets, and playwrights of the early twentieth century, works of fiction provided spaces to explore the ways that black women workers shaped and were shaped by the theory and practice of working-class resistance. This dissertation is an analysis of domestic labor and sexual labor that imagines the possibilities of black women’s resistance through the lens of literature. It examines four key figures, who considered these possibilities by centering domestic and sexual laborers in their work: sociologist, theorist, and longtime Communist activist, Esther Cooper Jackson, proletarian novelist William Attaway, famed author Richard Wright, and playwright, essayist, and short story writer, Alice Childress. For contemporary scholars, fiction (and the process of writing fiction) provides us with an intellectual framework that emerges from its historical moment, with which we can further understand and historicize black women’s sexual and domestic labor, both at the places where they overlap and those at which they diverge. More importantly, in analyzing domestic work as wage work, sexuality, sexual violence, and sexual desire, Wright, Attaway, and Childress generate new questions and new understandings of black womanhood, labor, and activism. While the writers’ evolving theorizations are certainly flawed and by no means comprehensive, an examination of their methodological processes (both those that work and those that don’t work) demonstrate a cultural, political, and historical significance of black women workers that cannot be ignored.

ETD_6866

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Shana A. Russell

doi:10.7282/T32J6DVP

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.