Barbara Smith biography
Date of birth : 1946-11-16
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Nationality : American
Category : Famous Figures
Last modified : 2010-08-27 10:49:05
Credited as : Author and feminist, In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, awarded Outstanding Woman of Color Award 1982
"Sidelights"
Black American feminist editor and essayist Barbara Smith is known both for editing volumes that concern homosexual black feminism and for being the first writer to characterize relationships between black women in classic black novels as being lesbian. Smith startled the individuals attending the National Conference of Afro-American Writers with a paper that identified relationships between black women in many American novels written between the 1940s and the 1970s as homosexual. Until Smith read her paper, no one had addressed the subject of black lesbianism publicly. Thulani Davis, writing in the Nation, stated that the lesbianism Smith says she uncovers in those novels and discusses in her paper is "basically the closeness and mutual support one often finds among women who are brutalized by life, but the word [lesbian] itself brought alarm. How could something lesbian, however amorphous, step out of black culture's shadows and into the acknowledged landmarks of our genius?"
In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Smith collected essays and stories from thirty-four black lesbians living in the United States and the Caribbean. The women write about what makes them and their experiences so different from other black women and their experiences; the collection celebrates the contributors' individuality. Smith believes that these differences and the expression and public acknowledgement of them are what add creativity and life to an interdependent culture. Smith argues that the suppression of these differences would destroy the vitality of the culture. She calls for inclusion, rather than exclusion, of people who are different, particularly black lesbians.
Few of the contributors to Home Girls are skilled writers, but, as Davis commented, their prose "flashes with the bitterness caused by class and color differences in the black community and by the violence visited so regularly on black women
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