Unknown Speaker 00:01 is in the room at the moment. Rosie prodata. He has the reputation for being one of the liveliest intellects in the Parisian, Dutch Australian scene at the moment, and she's an Italian and she's lived in all of those places. She right now has just become the director of Women's Studies at the University of Utrecht in Holland. And she's going to speak to us today about everlasting knots, feminism and critical theory, Rosie. Unknown Speaker 00:39 Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure and a great honor to be here. And I hope I can live up to my cosmopolitan reputation. Unknown Speaker 00:51 One important point to begin with, to situate the sort of paper I'm going to read, it is indeed very much from a non American perspective. And I hope you will not find it completely out of context. I also took the freedom to interpret freely the title of this conference motherhood versus sisterhood and to give it a twist that would fit in with the sort of work that I'm doing with other women in Western Europe on feminist epistemology, and feminist critiques of science. It's around the question of artificial reproduction and mechanized motherhood, as opposed to the quest for the politics of solidarity is Feminist sisters. It's about that sort of not that I would like to try and talk today. So I hope it fits in with the general trend of the work of the conference. I would like to start with two images, not just two rhetorical figures of speech, but also two representations of political struggle, two different images of how to deal with feminist critiques of scientific rationality. The first image is from cybernetic. It's the sideboard machine that Donna Haraway talked about, and that Anne McCaffrey described in novel that is very much a best seller, I think, the sheep who sang this machine which is half human and half machine, the hybrid the new monster, which represents the new high tech post modern post gender body as Donna Haraway describes it. The second image is the mother machine, the mechanized uterus, the artificial breeder, the fertility farm, which Gina Korea and others criticize, as in terms of the reproductive brothel. The first image embodies a positive, friendly vision of the body machine relationship in our high tech world. The cyborg as bio machine throws open a brand new set of innovative epistemological and ethical questions, which people particularly in the United States seem to associate with post modernism, but I'll put that terminology in inverted commas. As a political manifesto, the cyborg machine renews the language of political struggle moving away from the tactic of head on confrontations in favor of a more specific and diffuse strategy, which Haraway describes as political irony. Diagonal attacks, not frontal attacks. deconstructionism, maybe we'll come back to that, the mother machine however, the reproductive brothel embodies a rather negative and rather hostile view of the body machine relationship, stressing the potential for exploitation and for manipulation, and calling also for opposition to male dominated technology. The reproductive brothel calls into question deliberating force of scientific reason, and its potential impact for the relationship between the sexes in our advanced in inverted commas society. On the one hand, then, a vision of the body as machine the maternal body as machine machine meant as an assembled collection of integrated parts. And on the other hand with Yuna, Korea, the fear that the body may be just a machine and that the mother may be just another piece in a reproductive machine. In both cases, a powerful question mark about the future of science and technology and its repercussions on motherhood, sisterhood, womanhood, to images, which for me embody two aspects of the debate in feminist epistemology, about the status of rationality, and it's around that that I like to focus on. debate in this, the work of this conference, motherhood, sisterhood and rationality. A few words about the new reproductive technology debate, just a few because a lot is being said and has been said, and the pioneer work of career at dt dwelley, Klein, Roland and others has brought to our attention the dangers and the costs that reproductive technologies may imply for women. On the ideological front within the women's movement, at least in my context, there is a certain consensus about the dangers and the cost of reproductive technologies. We all agree that the campaign for reproductive technology has played in the hands of the neoconservative. demographical campaigns, large families reproduced for your country. Europe isn't zero population growth, we have to do better than that. And it's it's been a bit regressive on the moral and sexual politics front. Also, it has been confused particularly in Catholic countries with the anti abortion is campaigns of its played in the hands of people who wanted to call into question the abortion legislation. The other important danger on the reproductive technology front is the gap, the widening gap between infertile women who seek these reproductive techniques and claim the right to be mothers and have children and the feminist radical or others who call into question that right and trying to warn them about the potential dangers of the techniques that they are actually actively seeking. On the one hand, real women wanting real children through artificial methods. And on the other hand feminist warning them of the dangers being accused very unfairly, that very wide, widely by particularly by the media, being accused of being not only against femininity, but also against womanhood, which is quite ironic when you think of all the feminist movement has done to redefine and re valorize motherhood, here we are in this artificial reproduction debate being represented by the media as the ones who are anti children, anti woman, because we're trying to warn them about the dangers of this techniques. So a political danger with a gap of representatives at of the women's movement, which again, adds another chapter to the never ending saga of the crisis of legitimation of the feminist women, feminist movement, real women against you know, false women of proper Mothers Against the feminist. It's an another chapter in that debate. Even on the ideological front, therefore, some consensus has been reached. As far as I can see, on the theoretical one, the widest variety of positions seems to seem to be possible. There is absolutely no conceptual consensus as to how to go about criticizing scientific rationality, or the so called progress of technology. If you just think very briefly of the history of the feminist debate on epistemology from Firestones Marxist utopia of technology as liberation to a more recent ecological feminist naturalistic rejection of technology as being against nature and against women, we covered the whole broad spectrum of pot from anti rationality at the primary degree to really post post rationality, deconstructionism with no consensus in the middle. So paradoxically, I think in terms of feminist theory, our conceptual confusion may be where our political trouble may come from. In the long run, as I've tried to argue later on. It's around this sort of problem. That is why I've chosen these two images to play one against the other, the cyborg and the mother machine, as signposts of a very, very complex debate. And the argument that I would like to defend, although I probably will have to get it down a great deal. This argument rests on three interrelated sets of ideas, and I'll give you the sets of ideas and then I can skip the details and maybe we can talk about it in the coffee break. The first set of ideas is that the questions around artificial reproduction, the man made uterus, and whatever test tube babies all of that is a top priority, obviously, on the feminist political agenda for this end of century, it is again, one of the issues on which the future of gender differences will be played out and it is paradoxical and it is part of our history as women that once again, it is the structure and the status of motherhood that is going to define the parameters within which it will be possible for us as women to act as political subjects. And also to think of ourselves as subjects of another history. We are back to motherhood in a very perverse very dangerous sense. Second point through the whole biotechnology debate and especially through reproductive technologies, the notion of the body, underlined three times in Asterix red lights around it, the body machine, the body is meta the body politic, the bodies are transcendental, the body is back which body is Foucault and other French philosophers asked body body body, the body is at the heart of contemporary critiques of rationality, there is no consensus as to what it is that we talk about when we talk about the body. And in his list of recording perspective, in a perspective of genealogical deconstruction, of modernity, it is possible to explain why there is no consensus about the body. Why one of the paradoxes of a modern condition is this explosion proliferation of discourses about the body without a single cent synthesis of it without a single hardcore definition of what it is, God is probably dead, but it has left behind masses of fragments of semi divine entities, sexuality is one of those. Unknown Speaker 11:17 Third point, or third step of this argument is that feminist epistemology is critical theory directly and that as such, it fits into general trends of contemporary philosophical thought. And it is not at all anti theoretical with modern thought, or in any way alien to it. And what I like to try and to do is maybe talk very briefly about this, the second and third point that I sketched, rather roughly, and then come to some playful conclusion about which image of the body we are going to choose whether it is a reproductive brothel or if it is the cybernetic machine, very briefly about feminist epistemology. And this is where the national context are very important. I situate myself very much as somebody who reads American feminist texts and appreciates them a great deal. I don't have the means of contextualizing them. That's for you to tell. So here I am as a reader of your work about feminist epistemology from what I can gather. As Stimpson pointed out recently, a certain consensus of opinion seems to have been reached within feminist theory in the last five years, that the task of deconstructing sexist theories and constructing opposite theories is now giving way to a third stage the new wave, which would be seeking for more general epistemological frameworks. A book such as discovering reality by Harding and Hintikka asserts that the time has come for feminist scholars to move out of the soft stuff and go into the hardcore of abstract scientific reasoning, pornographic metaphor supporting that Fox Keller. Fox killer also states that the feminist insight should be extended into the very foundations of scientific thought. Jenny Lord, in the man of reason asks, Why should we live man with the privilege of rationality? Can't we take women as a starting point to construct different alternative systems of knowledge? Now, constructing alternative systems of knowledge is a conceptual and epistemological pretension or epistemological claim, which is quite different from a political ideological one, it seems from my reading of you that one of the things you're saying is that we can no longer give ideological answers to conceptual questions that we've got to go into the heart stuff. And it seems that the trend of the evolution of feminist thinking about rationality has moved from what Harding called The Woman question in science, which pertains to the struggle for more equality between the sexes, to what she calls the science question in feminism, where the question asked is how a science so deeply embedded with specifically masculine experiences and modes of representation can be at all liberating for women. And Hillary rose should also be quoted as one of the people who contributed to this debate, and she reinterpret Harding and Hintikka by saying, What is a stake in feminist epistemology is nothing less than the whole tradition, the evaluation of the whole tradition of the Enlightenment? Do we believe the reason is liberating for mankind and womankind? Or do we believe that it is implicitly and structurally attached to patterns of domination and exclusion? It's the whole 18th century the progress of Unknown Speaker 14:58 history and reason and social progress all those ideas that construct to the myth of the Enlightenment that are now being thrown open into question and feminism is one of the movement that is supposed to be assessing the teleology of reason at logical progress of reason through history at this end of century. Again, in my reading of what's happening in feminist epistemology, the great theoretical dividing line seems to be between those who claim that feminism can improve can be can be a successor project in science can take over and redefine the whole notion of scientific rationality in such a way as to make it more representative more maximally representative of human understanding free rationality from its gender biases, free rationality from its hegemonic connotations, and we can come to a redefinition of it. And women can be one of the social movements that accomplish that. I would call this the modernist school, the ones who believe that the historical complicity between reason and domination, rationality and oppression was an historical accident, which can be changed by appropriate social pressure. And women can be one of the groups that exercise that social pressure to clean up the mess of rationalistic reason. The other position consists in pointing out that the structural implicit complicity between rationality and domination is so deep and so embedded in the whole discourse of reason that there is nothing we can do about it. The historical necessity of freeing scientific rationality from its dominating connotations, requires fundamental internal transformations to the order of reason. And if we do that, by the time we finish, that'd be very little of the structure of scientific thought that is left untouched. In this framework, we could legitimately speak over the historical decline of rationality as a scientific and as a human ideal. Now, both Harding and rose for reasons that I do not understand, classified the second group, the people who think that there is an implicit complicity between reason and domination, the classify them as postmodern, in inverted commas. Postmodern meaning, this systematic loosening up of scientific discourse working towards critique and total displacement of the position of reason, postmodern in the sense that it's arguing that reason is just another kind of discourse, one type of discourse alongside others. And it's not at all the master discourse, or the central one, post modernism would be in Hardings and roses sense a sort of radical skepticism, and something which would allow for a marry confusion of disciplinary boundaries. My concern from I mean, it's my reading, so correct me if I'm wrong. My concern with this definition is less comes less from my particular loyalty to post modernism. I don't particularly care what we do with the term post modernism, but I do care what we do about the critiques of science. Now, from a European perspective, first of all, the term post modernism is not very useful, because it doesn't represent any one specific position, but rather a very fast growing field of inquiry, which is still to produce a very sharp, epistemological profile. I don't also find it useful because it's a term that suffers from a very high inflationary trend, the value, which is hardly useful, which is, Unknown Speaker 18:50 it's true. I can call myself a very trend inflationary value, which is hardly useful when we are trying to do epistemological sort of work. So I'm not trying to defend post modernism as such. But I am concerned with the construction of the postmodern stance in contemporary feminist epistemological debate. I think that what comes under post modernism deserves a better treatment, because it's something much more complex and much more ancient, in fact, that the so called post modernists trend, to argue for a structural implicit link between Western reason and domination in terms of race, class and sex, to argue for the need to dismantle such a link, putting rationality back in its place, stating that rationality is not the whole of human reason. And that reason, in turn, doesn't sum up the totality of or even what is best in the human capacity for thinking. Now saying all of that is nothing specific to post modernism. It is rather what Critical Theory has been arguing for about a century. And by critical theory, I mean the basic insight drawn from the first generation of the mystifies of reason at the end of the 19th century, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, all those God killers. The first generation the mystifies of reason, who stated that the liberating potential of Reason has a counterpart in oppression, and that consequently the whole 18th century myth of the teleological progress of reason has to be re examined. So, out of though the theoretical and material means of liberation through reason are within our reach, we seem to continue to live on happily and to develop patterns of domination and exploitation through reason. Now, that is what I call critical theory. And at least in contemporary continental thought, there have been two main traditions of critical thought the German one known as the Frankfurt School, the most vocal spokesman of which is Eugen Habermas, and the other one is the French post structuralist school, of which the most significant thinkers are Foucault Angelo's, in my opinion, the point in common is that the light the myth of liberation through reason has to be reanalyzed. In the light of history, particularly in the light of extreme historical phenomena, such as totalitarian systems, rationality died at Auschwitz, dialectical materialism died in the Cambodian Killing Fields. Blind faith in the self regulating power of reason is for us modern, incorrect, both as a theoretical as a political as and as an ethical position. In this sense, critical theory is an ethics. And here if time allowed us the key figure to reexamine would have to be Heidegger. But we put him into brackets, he was a great thinker. He was a great Nazi and we live in at that moment. There'll be a lot to be sad about how the two traditions of critical thought the German Habermas Adorno all those guys, and the French can help the feminist debate and should help the feminist debate on how to assess and to evaluate and to change the social status of reason, the debate between Habermas and Foucault has received a lot of media coverage. A lot. There's a lot we could say about that. But it is clear that in in building this debate is also the question of how today we reassess and we readapt both Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, and how we use them to further our understanding of what exactly is wrong with reason. I am less interested in working out the exact relationship between the different schools of critical of critical theory than in stressing the importance as an epiphenomenon. When I say feminist theory is critical theory, it means not only that the feminist debate fits in perfectly with what larger theoretical issues are at work in our culture at the moment. Not only that, but also that historically, in the very historical context of what we call modernism, the context in which feminism has emerged as a theory and as a practice, this is a context which has created itself, the structural conditions conducive to the revision, and the extension of the meaning of reason, it's at the same time and at the same cultural context, that we have developed both the need to criticize reason because of historical evidence. And also we have developed a gender specific type of analysis through feminist Unknown Speaker 23:52 readings of rationality and all of its social representations, simultaneous happening on this on the scale of history, between what Nietzsche used to call the becoming woman of culture, the gender specific type of approach, and at the same time, a crisis of the universal if you want a crisis of the idea of scientific rationality. No coincidence, of course, as my Marxist friends would say, it's not a coincidence, the two things are happening at the same time, but certainly a structural proximity of the question of woman with the question of modernity, as structural proximity, which is also historical one, which is also I would argue, a theoretical one. So inbuilt is the woman question into the modern debate that I don't think that the right question to ask is, why is the figure of a woman symptomatic of the modern condition? I don't think that's the question. I think the question should be given the structural transformations that allowed the emergence of women centered a woman centered modes of analysis, what alternative theory of knowledge would say Should this new feminist project? And what politics should go with this new alternative system of knowledge? Not why woman as a symptom of the modern condition, but given that inbuilt structural position, a woman as if you want the theoretical avant garde of this decadent Western culture, given that, then what can we do? In this sense? I think we can only give a political question, a political answer to a theoretical question. As an overall summary of the situation, I would say, should we or are we cupboard humanists? Do we want to rescue? What's left of rationality? Do we need some real estate theory of discourse after all? Or should we adopt a more radical form of epistemology that denies access to a real world and to a final truth, attempting to approach discourse analysis in a problematic mode, which is the image of thought, which is the image of the actual work job of act of thinking that is implicit in feminism? What is the image of thought that we actually rest our analysis on, which is the image that represents our theoretical corpus, the past divine affinity to a cybernetic machine, or the modernist fear of the artificial mother machine? Let me ask the same question differently. What theory of the body of the bodily human material do we rely on in our analysis body both in the field of reproduction and in a more general sense, and here, I'll open a parenthesis and then I won't read because it will take too long, but I was going to talk about the very specific school of epistemological materialism that has developed, I guess, through European socialism of the non Marxist kind. It's a bit acrobatic, but there it is, I'm thinking of the sort of people who have helped produce Foucault, not everybody reads Foucault and it's great. But if Foucault is possible, it's because behind him there is a whole tradition of bodily materialism. It's a bad translation from the French, it's more shaky for say in French, but it doesn't change anything limited rallies Macapa. While it's still the same idea, and it includes people like candy young people like Bachelard people like Khrushchev before that, people who looked at the human material through the history of philosophy of science, the bodily human material, as something which is a mass of energy, conditioned by society conditioned from within, conditioned by ideology, material matter if you want to, that, however, is not reducible to the sum of its parts. Typical French, you'd say a bit Byzantine, but here you have it, a body is never just the sum of its organs, although it is primarily material, this is the matter it is made of the body is also a threshold of transcendence, the body is also that which situates the human in a very specific, sort of human social context, Body Body Body again, Unknown Speaker 28:20 the text to read here, I think, is clunky, in text called the normal and the pathological retraces the history of biology, and tries to focus on bodily facticity the fact that the subject is embodied, and I think that is the key notion, the embodiment of the subject. And you find this idea then translated into a whole series of currents in contemporary continental thought, the body in phenomenology sat MLO Ponte, the body in psychoanalysis, especially through Lacan, the body in the biosciences with our legal and ethical implications, Foucault and Kanki, Yun, again proliferations of discourse on the body, what we're really talking about is the fact that to speak meaningfully about the human subject, we've got to start from his and her embodiment, this is the starting point. This is also the starting point for Foucault and everything he does about the sexuality and the body, bodily materialism rather than historical materialism if you want and Biofire power as a consequence of that. This The second important point of this and this is why this French epistemological school is so important is that in building this rather old French school of thinking about the body, is the idea of natural affinity between bodies and machines. You find that right through a bachelor it's certainly in a great deal of candy and also, nature for men is biotechnological technology. article in Scientific there is no our natural habitat is highly artificial Homo sapiens is essentially Homo Faber. And there is nothing in the world of technology or technique that is alien to the human being. This gives you a couple of other interesting side readings for instance, the idea of a continuity between the manufacturing of tools the hand that shapes a single stone to the manufacturing of highly elaborated computers, technology complete and perfect human nature can be m and Foucault go one step further. And they say not only does technology complete the human evolution, if you want to, but also the machine imitates the body, there is a mimetic relationship between the machine and the body, that people who have been severely handicapped and have had to rely on machines know about there is a real Mises is this probably a real effect of mixture and transference some would say, between the body and machine, no hostility, no antithetical relationship at all. The reason why that is so according again to the French Epistemologists, of the non Marxist materialist kind, here we have a new a new jargon. The reason why that is possible is that the machine is a is a paradigm, the machine is something which formalizes not only the difference between the human and non human is not just something that, if you want, separates and divides the human from its other, the machine is also a paradigm to explain how the two things work together. It is also a working hypothesis about the interaction between the human and what's outside the machine is always somewhere along the line, a metaphysical construction. If even if you look at the machines in Descartes that some of my students still believe is the guy who invented dualism, will you please not believe that it did, but even in a hard time and do at least like Descartes, if you look at the role of the machine in his work, it's not just an alienating force that splits the human apart. The machine is really a prototype of the soul. It's something that explains how the whole thing hangs together, how integration is possible, how circulation of effect is possible. And in that sense, of course, there is a logical continuity of function between the human and the machine. Conclusion nothing but questions. Unknown Speaker 32:39 I like to with all of this in mind like to to go back to the first images, I started off with the cybernetic one and the artificial uterus. Which one do we choose? Which one, how should we go about choosing them? I would like to say again, as a way of a conclusion, firstly, that the opposition between these two models, the cybernetic one, and the reproductive brossel is probably real conceptually, rather than politically there are two different ways of looking at the technological item. And maybe the political struggle as Donna Haraway pointed out herself, consists in trying to see the problem of science technology from both points of view, not just negatively but also from what it entails as a liberating potential. Secondly, as an epistemological model, the cybernetic one is, in my opinion, a perfectly adequate one, because it does help us break out of the dualistic barrier between the human and the nonhuman. However, if we do take the cyborg as our model, then the body that we are talking about is neither the sum of its parts not nor a purely social product. The body in question is neither physical nor mechanical. And it's not just textual, either, like some postmoderns would want us to believe. The body in question is a modern rereading of what used to be called in the old world, the unity of the body and the mind. The body on this in the cybernetic model is in fact a rereading of a functional rereading of the soul. It is a metaphysical entity. And metaphysics is not a dirty word. metaphysics is a not an abstract construction, it is a political ontology. It is the madness of the West. It is the conceptual structure on which the whole marriage of rationality and violence has been negotiated, at least in my culture. So if we are going to take her always model and seriously and I think we should then be taking on the whole job of what people like Derrida and others have called the deconstruction of metaphysics, and it's going to take a long time to get that one under control. So the mesh She in the bio machine is a model of interaction and not just as a model of division as an alternative to the soul. And for many, many years now, I have been looking for a materialist alternative to the soul. By soul I don't mean an ethical entity by Amina logical function. And it's, it's a difficult one to do. So let's take metaphysics seriously, let's take the questions of essences seriously if we are going to take the cybernetic model seriously. Unknown Speaker 35:31 Because what is at stake here is the political viability of materialism. And I think maybe Nietzsche killed God, but I don't think the idealism of that system is truly over as yet. And I agree with Haraway when she says that I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess. But But I don't think we can jump there that easily. Third point, it would be unfair to associate this epistemological model of the cybernetic machine with post modernism. I don't think it's correct, certainly in the history of thought, for as I said, of at least a century, in my culture anyway, people have been looking for a materialist theory of the unity of mind and soul. The quest for a new way of redefining the unity of the human being is rather old, much older than both we are leotard and all those guys. Fourth point the project does define the project of overcoming if you want metaphysics is not specifically feminist. The model of the cybernetic machine is not specifically in itself, gender specific, though feminism fits into it. And though as I've been trying to say earlier on, I think that feminism has historically and theoretically provided the our priori conditions for a critique of reason as the universal heart Nevertheless, the model of the cybernetic cyborg is not gender specific, and how it would stand the analysis of gender specific type of readings, I do not really know. And this is my final point. Because of this, if you wish, uncertainty about the gender specificity of the modern is the postmodernist or the cybernetic reading, of scientific rationality, because of that, I am extremely reluctant to associate the cybernetic model, which I think is epistemologically correct, with one of the conclusions that Haraway droves, which is the past gender machine, I am extremely reluctant to accept that oppose the rationality model, or an enlargement rationality model would necessarily be opposed to gender one, one which would overcome the differences between the sexes, I can never even imagine what overcoming the differences between the sexes could be and every time I try it becomes nightmarish. Maybe it's my paranoia. But I hesitate. I hesitate to believe in any systems political or theoretical, that would argue that the effacement of sexual difference is a necessary precondition for real progress. I think that if the effacement of sexual differences is ominous in itself, when we put it in this way, to answer because I have no real solution or counter solution to give to that, but as an alternative to jumping from a world in which one sex and the masculine appropriated the universality of the power of reason to a past, past past card world where there'll be no more differences of sex, class or race before we fantasize this monumental qualitative leap, let us not forget that the historical and theoretical context which has produced the women's movement, Western advanced capitalist countries, such as mine, such as the ones I come from that very social context, which has allowed the emergence of a claim to gender specific presence, both in Theory and Practice, is also the culture which for over a century, has been looking for a new way of saying, The Unbearable Lightness of the unity of the human being, a way of putting together the mind and the body, the material and the spiritual way which would not rest on the fantasy of a divine entity, but on a real recognition of both the limitations of rationality and of its endless potential for human liberation. Thank you Unknown Speaker 40:27 our last speaker is Barbara Christian, who many of you know from her by her pioneering work on Black Feminist criticism. And today she's going to speak to us about somebody forgot to tell somebody something, the historical novels of contemporary Afro American women, Barbara Unknown Speaker 40:53 in the history of Colombia to receive a PhD, things have certainly changed since then. We're going to move now from the theoretical is that a historical and very, very specific in a way, and I must say, not as an apology, but a kind of explanation that this paper is not about motherhood and sisterhood, though it is. It's kind of a pre paper to that. The title of my paper is taken from a radio interview and Zaki sangee did, with Toni Morrison in 1978, just after she had published Song of Solomon. Morrison's comment referred to a generation of Afro Americans of the post world war two era, who'd seen the new possibilities of that period seemed to promise for their children, and who thought that knowledge of their family history one of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and racism and their effects might deter the younger generations hopes for the future, as Marcin put it, the older generation of that era, sometimes acts out the southern grandfather, who had been a sharecropper and tried to forget the brutality of the Afro American past. In how I wrote Jubilee in 1970. Do Margaret Walker tells a similar story of how her mother resented the stories about slavery. Her grandmother told the young Margaret and how she admonished the older woman, not to tell the child those horrifying lies. Alice Walker tells us in a BBC documentary in The Color Purple, which he did in 1986, that her family spoke in whispers about certain parts of the history, whispers, which she said, fascinated her. Unknown Speaker 42:42 These Afro American writers, as well as many others, comment on the ambivalence their families felt toward the Afro American past. In the 1980s, Marcin Walker, as well as surely and Williams, previously, a poet and playwright, have written Afro American historical novels. A sign of these writers desire to read and rewrite re envision Afro American history, from their imaginative and informed point of view. This trend is, I think, an indication of the fascination not only novelists and scholars, but also many other women have with the experiences of Afro American women in the 19th and early 20th century, the very periods that Marcin characterized as being axed out by upwardly mobile Afro Americans of the 40s and 50s. This is not to say that as a group, Afro American women writers have not previously recalled the past. However, generally speaking, they have reached back to the period of their mother's lives, from the 1920s to the 60s, to a past which often involves shifts in values and Afro American communities in technology, sometimes migration from the rural south and Western knees to the south, the small town or urban north. So for example, Morrison's first three novels Bluest Eye Sula, Song of Solomon, much of Walker short fiction as well as her novels. Mark and Paul Marshalls Brown Girl brown stones, Gloria Naylors, Maddy Michaels section of the women of booster place, all explored the 20s 30s and 40s from the Afro American woman's perspective. As Marshall Morrison and Walker have told us they were in the process of consciously imagining their novels propelled by the stories their mothers told them about their lives. During the last decade, these writers have also probed their own contemporary context Bambara was guerrilla my love and Walker's Meridian asked pivotal questions about girls and women who were living in the intensely black consciousness decade of the 1960s Marcin entire baby Bambara and the seabirds are still alive Shaggy and sassy. Cyprus and indigo explore the relationships of women and men. As affected by the second wave of feminism. I'll go from very different points of view, Marshall and pray Psalm for the widow, Morrison and tar baby Nayla and Linden Hills examined the effects of the middle class mobility of some blacks in the 1960s and 70s. While in the Women of Brewster plays Nayla tells the story of underclass contemporary African American black women, Afro American women have even extended the present into the future. As Susan Willis points out in her study specifying the most overt work being Bambara as the soul eaters, as a group, then contemporary Afro American women have written about every decade of the 20th century, and about every region of this country, the North, the Midwest, the South, the West, the country, small town and inner city, the underclass and the middle class. And they have even traveled in their fiction, beyond the geographical borders of this country, to the Caribbean, to Europe to Africa. Yet even as many of these writers have in their earlier novels focused on the 20th century, they have in the same novels taken us back in time, perhaps because as Alice Walker has pointed out, anything of the immediate present is too artificial. One needs historical perspectives to give resonance and depth to a work of art. So Morrison's Pilate tells us the story of her father, who was an ex slave, a story which milkman was discovered through his travels in time and space, to be a part of his own being. The bottom the land on which Sula is situated, is payment to a slave from his master. Why Linden Hills in Naylors novel of that name, is lucid nee deeds legacy from his ex slave ancestor, Meridian and walk a second novel must look back, who are ancestors of the 19th century to understand the meaning of black motherhood. While the mud mothers of Bambara salt eaters continually remind us of the mythic past, even when major characters resist the past, as Macon and Milton dead doing Song of Solomon Avi Johnson does in praise of the widow. It intrudes itself upon their consciousness through dream and or song, and especially the sense of dis ease they feel in the present. The use of history in the novels of contemporary African American women writers then is constant and consistent. However, all the previous novels have US history. Within the context of the present and the future, most of them would not have been properly called historical novels. In the last few years novels by Afro American women have explored those very periods that some posts for Afro Americans have attempted to erase. So Color Purple is second reconstruction, Georgia. Beloved, in the post slavery years, and deaths arose in the 1840s at the height of American slavery. These three novels are historical novels, in that they recall a life that supposedly no longer exists, and create recreate societies that apparently past in examining this trend in Afro American women's writing, which so interestingly, comes at the point and Paula points that we're beginning to have a new era. I am not only interested in the novels themselves, but why are they appearing now at this particular point in time. And I had originally intended this paper to look at first of all the novels that come out of slavery, then out of reconstruction, and then to look at some of the issues of motherhood and sisterhood. And I've only gotten to part one. So this is what you're hearing. Unknown Speaker 48:55 In order to understand the ways these contemporary novels revision history, it is first necessary I think, to examine the fact that historical novels by Afro American women have appeared before and that there exists pieces written by Afro American women during the periods about which these three contemporary novels are written. There is a small but important body of female slave narratives in which successful runaway slaves record aspects of their lives. Perhaps the most notable of these is the incidents incidents in the life of a slave girl, written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brandt. For much of this century, questions of authorship, camouflage the significance of this narrative. It is only recently that Jean Yellen has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that Harriet Jacobs did exist, that she was a slave that she did it escaped slavery only by hiding out in an attic for seven years, and that she did write her own story. Yet despite the fantastic ins Students that she tells us about her experiences with slavery. In slavery. Jacob coats her narrative and often tells the reader that because of modesty, a specifically female term, and her desire not to offend her audience, a specifically Afro American consideration, she had to omit certain details of her life story. In her introductory remarks to her reading of beloved that Toni Morrison made when she was at Berkeley last October, she emphasized the consistency with which the slave narratives made such statements. Morrison pointed out that their missions were partly due to the wider audience that ex slaves were expected to address. But even more, she should suggest that they omitted certain events because they were too horrible, too dangerous for the narratives themselves to recall. Morrison went on to state that it was these consistent comments made by 19th century ex slaves, about their deliberate omissions in the narratives, which intrigued her, and that this was the initial impulse for writing the novel that would become beloved. Clearly, one of the major themes of this masterpiece is the paradox of what Morrison calls it. My mother OC used this term use this term rememory not merely memory. But remember, Morrison emphasizes this theme throughout the novel, and reiterates it in the last words of Beloved, this was not a story to pass on. In a different way, surely, Ann Williams in her preface, the Desert Rose states the same idea that Morrison made about her impulse to write beloved, Williams tells us, I love history as a child, until some clear eyed young Negro pointed out quite rightly, that there was no place in the American past, I could go and be free. I now know that slavery eliminated neither heroism nor love. It provided occasions where their expressions Unknown Speaker 52:09 Not only were the slave scenarios restrained by modesty, and by audience from not passing on some stories. So Afro American 19th century novelists include Tao, the first novel published by an Afro American writer in this country, William Wells Brown made palatable the experiences of his Quadroon slave heroine by fashioning her character according to the acceptable ideal image of woman at that time. So Kotel is beautiful meaning fair, thoroughly Christian and European upperclass in her demeanor and language, Afro American women writers have also used the same construct, most notably a Francis hopper and I O Roy, which was thought until the rediscovery of our NYG to be the first novel to be published by an Afro American woman. But what is not focused on in these novels is as important as the images these writers emphasized, for in these novels little light is shed on the experiences and culture of ordinary slaves, like Seth or Paul the desert rose or cane or on their relationships or communities. kotel grows up with a mother, her mother, who because she is the natural wife of her master, lives in a fairy tale like cottage completely apart from other slaves. I oh boy is a slave but only for a short time, and had as a white woman been educated in fine schools. While Brown and Hopper gives us they give us hints through their minor characters of the physically and psychologically harsh conditions under which most slaves lived. They reserve privileged positions for the heroines, thus exhibiting even more modesty than the slave narratives. For the sentimental romance form, the mandate not only a beautiful refined heroine, but that the story be entertaining and edifying Unknown Speaker 54:11 an idea such as the one which generates beloved the existence of a hate a spirit, a visit from the visitor from the past, who is embodied, and in which the major characters naturally believe. Though one important belief in Afro American culture could not possibly have been seriously considered by these 19th century novelists. They would have been fully cognizant of the detrimental effects the use of such a superstition, or non Christian concept would have on their own people. Nor could 19th century audiences react favorably to a contrary slave like Desert Rose, who attacks her master and leads a slave rebellion which results in the death of many whites. Such audiences would have been even more alarmed by the presentation of a crazy slave like Seth, who would kill her own child, rather than have her return to slavery. Clearly Brown and Harper leading activists of the day would have heard about such events. Certainly, the story of Margaret Garner, on which beloved is based was sensational enough to be known by hopper. But she as well as other Afro American writers could not muddy you already murky waters of sentiment towards the Negro by presenting characters who might terrify their readers that these 19th century writers will constrained by the socio political biases of their time is graphically demonstrated by the disappearance of Herod Nick, Herod Wilson's, our neg, although Mrs. Wilson wrote a strong, fluent novel, which is obviously autobiography, autobiographical, although she employed a form, which fused elements of the slave narrative and the romance sentimental romance that readers expected and works written by blacks and by women. Our Nick did not cater to the accepted mores of the time by emphasizing the racism of Mrs. Belmont, a white northern mich mistress by exposing racism in the north, as well as by ending her story with her desertion by her fugitive slave husband Freidel, the protagonist of our Nick question the progressive black platform of her time, that white northern women were the natural allies of blacks, that the North was not racist, that all black men were devoted to the women of their race. As important fratto who self is the result of an interracial marriage between a white woman and a black man, a type of union that was simply not supposed to have existed. readers could cope with Kotel and I always ask history that their father was white, their mother black, but acknowledging that white women would willingly be sexually involved with black men, was opposed to white women so sacred position, that they were a treasure to be possessed only by white men. The reception of this arose in this decade illustrates the longevity of this taboo. For many readers, black and white, a stun, sometimes offended by the sexual relationship between Mizzou fell, a white mistress and Nathan a runaway slave. Despite the historical evidence that such relationships existed. The disappearance of our Nick for some 100 years was also due to doubts raised about its authorship. Like incidents in the life of a slave girl, our neg was thought to have been written by a white woman, because of its point of view, and its excellent style. So Henry Louis Gates in his 1983 introduction to this newly discovered classic had to spend many pages establishing Mrs. Wilson's existence, that she was a free black woman, and that the incidents in our neck are based on her life. When 19th century Afro Americans wrote in a manner then that did not correspond to deeply held opinions of their time, their very authorship was put in put in question, such a restriction the ultimate one for a writer, in that it obliterates his or her very existence, would certainly have affected the way he or she would write about Afro Americans. One of the critical areas in which these writers were restricted is their very medium that of language. Since slaves were hardly conceived of as human beings who had a culture, their language was emphatically devalued. This devaluation is central to what experience can be passed on, for language is the repository of one's point of view and experience. Whether it be that of oppression, resistance to it or a value system, yet Afro American language could not be seriously fashioned. By 19th century writers to dramatize their characters, for that language was considered at best to be comic. At worst, a symbol of ignorance. 19th century writers like brown and Hapa imbue their heroines and heroes with a language that indicated their superiority. A language which is no way can be distinguished from the language of well bred white Americans. When these writers do us dialect minor and that's in quotes dialects, minor characters employed for Comic Relief. If one compares Sealy desert rose or sets language to the language of Cloudtail or Iola, one immediately feels what is missing, for it is difficult to communicate the authenticity of a character without investing her language. With value, if there is any one false sounding note in the novels about slavery and reconstruction, it is the language of the characters, the way the imagination of the authors are constrained by the language that characters use. Language is not only an expression of one's everyday experiences, but also of those deeper caverns of dream and memory. Areas to which 19th century slave characters had little access. If memory were to be central to kotel or Iola, it would take them back to the past. Beyond their personal history to stories their mother's told them, possibly back to the Middle Passage, so horrendous a memory that Morrison dedicated beloved to those anonymous 60 million or more memory might even take them back to an African man, like the one who taught Corinne and DESA rose to play the banjo. To acknowledge that slaves had memory with threatened the very ground of slavery, for such memory would take them back to a culture in Africa, where they existed as June Jordan invoked in her essay on flute, Phyllis Wheatley, in terms other than the ones imposed upon them in America, specifically for black abolitionist like William Wells, brown allusions to Africa were politically diverting, since they disagreed with their recent resettlement movement, which sought to correct the moral problem of American society by sending enslaved and displaced blacks back to Africa. So memory when it does exist in 19th century Afro American novels about slavery goes back but one generation to one's mother, but certainly not much further back than that. Slave owners were aware of the power of memory for the disrupted generational lines of slaves in such a way, and many slaves did not know even their own parents or children. 19th century writers like brown and Harper tour are certainly aware of the power of memory for their protagonist above all else, cling to the memory of parent child loved one. In Brown's first version of Kotel, he has his heroine give up her freedom to search for her child, only to have her drown herself rather than be re enslaved. Her story kotel story is the other side of sets action in the shed, in that one mother kills herself for her child, while the other mother saves the best part of herself by freeing her child from enslavement through death. Brown does not linger long on the personal emotional aspects of hotels suicide, for His purpose is to illustrate the evils of the institution of slavery. Morrison on the other hand is riveted on the use of memory in all her characters search for self understanding, but 19th century novelists could not be so much concerned with the slave as subject as they had to be concerned with the institution itself. They therefore had to sacrifice the subjectivity and therefore the memory of their characters to an emphasis on the slaveholders and their system. Unknown Speaker 1:03:23 Re memory is a critical determinant in how we value the past. What we learn from the past, what we emphasize what we forget, as Marcin, is so beautifully demonstrated in Beloved. But that concept could not be at the center of a narratives revisioning of history. Until the obvious fact that Afro Americans did have a history and culture firmly established in American society for writers would be constrained not only by their readers points of view, but also by the dearth of available information about the past, which would give their work authenticity. In her essay, and how she wrote her historical novel, you believe Margaret Walker pointed to these difficulties. On the one hand, she made it clear that memory was the impetus for the novel, since it grew out of her promise to her grandmother to write her mother's story. On the other hand, as a writer in the 1940s, who wanted to write an Afro American historical novel, she knew that few people black and white were informed about slavery and early reconstruction, the context in which very her great grandmother lived. She tells us that she found in her research that there were at least three historical versions of slavery, the white southern version in which the institution was benevolent, necessary and paternalistic, the northern white version which often emphasize the horrors of slavery, but it was not particularly interested in the lives of slaves. The Afro American version of which there were few accounts in which tended to focus on the lives of extraordinary slaves, almost As always men. In each version, the institution of slavery, meaning the slave holders themselves were pivotal, while the slaves were reduced to a voiceless mass, how then was Walker to write a novel which gave sufficient information about slaves to the reader, who was either at run of the period, or believe in false myths, such as the ones featured and Gone With the Wind? How was she to do that and focus on very an ordinary slave woman who knew little about the larger political struggles that determine her life, a woman who could not read or write, and who had not been more than 20 miles from the place where she was born, Walker decided that the form of her historical novel would be that of a folk novel, it would emphasize the fact that Afro American slaves had a culture and the community even as it sketched the outline of more specific historical data, like the fugitive slave law, or the legal conditions that determine the free black status in the early 19th century. In early 19th century Georgia, she would have to give readers histor history lessons, she would have to invest with meaning the apparently mundane everyday experiences of a woman protagonist, and she would have to convince her reader that a viable culture and community existed among slaves, confronted with so much territory that she needed to cover, in order to render various story it is not surprising that Walker's characters black and white are not so much subjects, as they are the means by which we learn about slave culture, about slave the slave holders culture, and the historical period. Vary, for example, hardly speaks in the first half of the novel, although she becomes more vocal in the reconstruction period. Despite the many details about which Walker informs her readers, her characters have little internal life, perhaps because Walker, who is writing her historical novel in the 40s and 50s, could not give slaves the right to claim those events, they do not want to remember, not only what is done to them, but what them themselves might have had to do given their precarious context. So various various character is not complex in the way set and desert roses are, but we are seldom privy to her internal conflicts, and to the doubt she might have about her relations to others. Interestingly, one of the few times when we do feel her ambivalence about what she should do is when she must choose between an escape for herself and leaving her children behind in slavery, as in beloved, and nessarose. Motherhood is the context for the slave woman's most deeply felt conflicts. What Walker does accomplish so effectively in Jubilee is the sense of an Afro American culture which an evil the ordinary slave to survive, and in building her novel around very a hard working mulata. She revise the image of the beautiful refined mulata heroine of the 19th century, an image with her grandmother's stories refuted. Unknown Speaker 1:08:10 That image is further revised and Barbara Chase robos Sally Hemings a novel which not many people know about, but which was published in 1979. A fictional biography of the Afro American woman reputed to be Jefferson's mistress for some four years. Brown's first version of Koh Tao, which was sensationally subtitled, The president's daughter, was based in fact, on in part on the fact that Hemings was Jefferson's mistress. But brown use this slave moonlighters existence to cast shadows on the great Jefferson, who had once had a black mistress and children he would not free, and who nonetheless championed freedom and democracy. In contrast, Chase, Chase rowboat uses a romantic frame, to dig into the myth of Saturday Hemings and reveal this complex woman's bond to her master, both as a slave and as a lover. Chase robber was interested not only in the contradictions between Jefferson's personal and political life, and in the institution of slavery, but also in the way knights in the 19th century definition of love is related to the definition of slavery. Still, Chase Rebo has her protagonist tell her story to a white man who was trying to rationalize slavery. Sudan a time Sally's narrative seems as censored as the slave narratives of the 19th century because of the historical information available to her, not only about Jefferson himself, but also because of the work done in the 60s about Afro American slave communities. Chase for bulk would free her narratives from narrative from some of the history lessons that Walker was obliged to give her reader however, in a telling moment in the novel, she East Rubble has Sally Hemings burn all her records her diaries that proclaimed her existence and her life with Jefferson, which she no longer wants to recall. The author is faced with a dilemma for Hemmings, her major character is encased in myth. Yet she lingos and only lingers in the margins of historical records. Because chase for a boom was rescue her heroine from myth. She cannot completely free herself of the conventional trappings of the historical novel, trappings which constrain her imaginative views of historical data that is not so with Morrison's beloved, and Williams Desert Rose, both of which are based on historical notes that are not controlled by them. Although beloved is derived from the sensational story of Margaret Garner, or runaway slave woman who attempted to kill herself and her children rather than be returned to slavery, Morrison leaves the historical facts behind to prove a not easy to resolve paradox that of Mother Love, and how that's so natural and quotes and personal emotion is dramatically affected by a political institution slavery. Morrison has said that she did not inquire further into Garner's life, other than to note the event for which the slave woman became famous. And indeed, Margaret Ghana did not achieve freedom as Morrison Seth does. Instead, she was tried, not for attempting to kill her child, but for the real crime that of attempting to escape, that is of stealing the property herself from her master. For that crime, she was tried, found guilty and sent back to slavery, thus restoring his property. But Marcin takes us beyond the world of the slave owners, into the world of slaves as complex human beings, in creating set who must remember her killing of her own child, who must reflect upon whether she has the right to commit such an act, a destructive act against her child, which is also paradoxically for the love of her child. Morrison asked disturbing questions about Mother Love. And in giving set her legal freedom Marcin is able to explore the nature of freedom. For as she says, freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. Unknown Speaker 1:12:34 Surely Ann Williams also based her novel and historical notes is often happens in historical research. The discovery of one source leads us to another. That's a rose is rooted in two brief notes. About a southern woman wants a slum want to slay the other white woman who lived in the first half of the 19th century. Williams discovered in Angela Davis's reflections on the black woman's role in the community of slaves, a pregnant slave woman who helped to lead an uprising and whose death sentence was delayed until after the birth of her child. That note led her to another source African American slave revolts, in which Williams learned about a white woman living on an isolated farm, who was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. Williams responds to these two women whose actions appear to refute what we have been told about both Afro American and white Southern women of the 19th century, refined reveals her point of view fall like beloved Jessica Rose is based on recorded historical facts, yet not determined by them for Williams comments how sad that these two women never met. Unknown Speaker 1:13:47 as important to the structure of the novel, as a discovery of these two historical sources, is Williams rage at the credibility given to Styris, the confessions of Nat Turner, which he pointed out is an indication of how Afro Americans remain at the mercy of literature and writing. In emphasizing her Reishi highlights another s aspect of the slave narrative tradition on which Morrison had also commented, a tradition which by the way, continues on to this very day. For these narratives were often taught to whites who did not necessarily understand or sympathize with the slaves experience, but who because they were the writers of the narrative passed on in history, the slave experience to use a title for Valerie Babs essay in The Color Purple. Desert Rose is a knob which attempts to undo what writing has done. For in her novel millenniums, demonstrates the substantive difference between desert roses memory of her experience, her telling of it to a white man, and Nehemiah his interpretation of this roses story, which is of course affected by his desire to write a sensational bestseller In beloved Morrison underlines the way that literary tradition is buttress by an intellectual one school teacher not only exploit slaves, he is fascinated by the intellectual, rational arguments he constructs to rationalize their exploitation. Throughout the 19th century American intellectuals perform that function, a function of providing intellectual arguments for a profitable, legal and dehumanizing institution they admire and school teachers interest in the slave was indeed scientific. There as their historical counterparts did measure the various parts of the slaves bodies, did observe their characteristics, did interpret their behavior, did write serious treatises on them. Marcin stresses these activities, apparently neutral ones, in which intellectuals and scientists were fascinated with slaves by having the most terrible act done to set the milking of her body for school teachers scientific observation, be a bleeding wound in her memory. Williams and Marcin then indict the American literary and intellectual tradition and clearly, neither of their novels would be what they are. If it were not for the previous historical fiction by African American women, not paradoxically, would they novels be as vivid as they are, if during the last decade there has not been an intense interest among scholars in the history of Afro American women from their point of view, in recent years, we have seen the publication of works from the hair to for forgotten female slave narratives, to analyses from women historians when faced with different perspectives. Paula Giddings, for example. Such publications have grown out of our increased awareness that women's experiences are integral to Afro American history. Paradoxically, paradoxically, that awareness not only gives us back historical data, it frees the novelist from that data, to remember that which could not be precisely recorded, but which continues to exist in storytelling, cultural patterns in the imagination. In both these novels, such remembering such reimagining centers on motherhood, on mothering and being mothered for slave women on the one hand, motherhood was denied the value obliterated by slavery, or it was considered to be breeding. While on the other hand, it was absolutely critical to the concept of self and to the very survival of oneself. It is through the memory of their mothers, their reflection on that precarious role, and whether they themselves were able to be mothered that Seth and DESA rose delve into themselves as subject. In beloved this is true of all the women characters baby Suggs, Seth, Denver, beloved, even the white girl, Amy Denver, Seth knows quote, what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you to have the holler and fight for it. Then one knows what it is to see her mother in a terrible place, for she drinks her mother's milk with her sister's blood. Beloved yearns for a complete union with her mother, the mother who kills her. For her her mother's face is her face, and without her mother's face, she has no face while Mars and moves us into the apparently chaotic and creative space of mother love Mother paying daughter love daughter pain, a space that can barely be sketched. In terms of historical data. Williams moves us in another direction. She explores the concept of mammy. That double edged term which slave owners use for Afro American mothering. By reversing the usual AMI image that of the black mammy nursing the white man, the white woman or the white child, Williams creates a different contexts for that term, who fell the white mistress, and the only nursing woman on her neglected farm feels obliged because of her own womanhood, to nurse the baby of the ailing darky Desert Rose. But the white woman could not have felt she had permission to do such a thing if he was under a husband's control, and was not isolated and was not isolated from other whites. As she nurses that black baby to dreams aloud about what she considers to be the source of her own mother love her mammy, who is in effect, not her mother, but her darky slave in an exchange that emphasizes the way these two women interpret that Mother Love. William shows us How power relations affects mothering. When we fell claims that her mommy loved her, that's a rosary taught you ain't got no mammy, what her name that child don't know it's mother's name. Unknown Speaker 1:20:13 Enlisting the name of her mother's children, names that she can remember. DESA rose also establishes the existence of a slave community with relationships that provide as she pointed out in her preface, occasions for the heroism and love that her novel explores. So Desert Rose is so her the novel Williams novel opens up those spaces in which heroism and love within the African American community can be explored. Desert Rose attacks her Masta because she he has killed tying her lover, she and the men and the Koffler able to plan an uprising together, and that action binds them forever in friendship. Later, they are able in an adventure as exciting as any in American lore to free themselves and go west. That's why this room has been made into a movie, I'm sure. Still, the free Desert Rose is able to recall despite the excitement of that adventure. What she primarily recalls when she tells her story many years later, to one of her grandchildren, is her mother braiding her hair. William ends the novel with this focus on rememory Fidessa. Rose insists on having her story written down she says all we have paid for our children's place in the world again and again. But while Desert Rose may remember her mother's name Seth Paul, the baby shrugs cannot. For Seth, a mother is a mark for she knows her only by the circle with a cross branded into her skin. Morrison's novel then moves us into those spaces we do not want to remember in the spaces where there are no names. But beloved, those forgotten ones of the past even to the 60 million anonymous ones of the Middle Passage, those terrible spaces, yet existing spaces, which was slave women, slave men, slave children, divide them even as they can bring them together. So in her novel, The adventure is not an external one, but a more dangerous internal one of the self remembering and assessing its past of Paul D who lives to the terror of a chain gang of set who kills her own child, a baby sucks who cannot even remember about her own children of debt Denver, who doesn't want to remember her mother's Act, a beloved, who is that part of their past that they all attempt to forget. In the last pages of the novel Morrison leaves us with that beloved, a loneliness that rooms that is alive on its own. But by and by his gone for remembering scenes on wise. The story of beloved of all the Beloved's are not a story she says to pass on that could be passed on and the records of historians or the slave narrators yet it remains in the dream in the folktale in the wind in the imagination. In fiction, paradoxically, only when that history is explored, evaluated, freed, is memory free to flow. Then although somebody forgot to tell somebody something, the past finds its way back into our memory. Last, like Beloved, we erupt into separate parts. Unknown Speaker 1:24:20 Barbara Christian always makes me cry, and it makes me want to move. So I want to make a few announcements before we end this morning session on Tuesday, which is the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. There will be a commemoration at Barnard from 930 to 1230. And the public is welcome. If you're free to come for all or any part of that now in right, Adelman will launch the memory and there are other speakers and there are signs throughout the college. Want to also announce On some coming attractions on April 13, continuing Barbara Christian speech and what Isabel Allende will will be here from 12 to two on a panel with Louise Meriwether Meredith tax and Mary Gordon, talking about the historical novel, so there'll be a continuity into mid April. And then at the end of October 1988, a new writer named some of you may know and whose books you can purchase downstairs, J California Cooper will be the read lecture. And this is the first announcement of that. I also have a date for next year scholar and feminist will be on the first of April 1989. And they posted but put it in your book and keep that date because we're very competitive about dates in late March and early April. To the material reality There are bathrooms on every floor of this building. So don't get quiet at the first one. But a persevere down the down the steps and there's a bathroom on the third floor at the very end of the hallway. If you have not yet received your registration packet stop off at the Center for Research on Women, which is 101 Barnard Hall, because you need your lunch ticket in order to get lunch and you need your registration packet to get your lunch ticket. The Lunch will be in Macintosh at the lower level and there are signs telling you how to get there and students will tell you your way as well. And we'll see you after lunch. Unknown Speaker 1:26:38 Thank you