Changing Our Own Words

Writing by and about black women has become essential to any consideration of the role of literature in society. Black women's writing raises issues of race, class and gender, and questions the formation of the literary canon, the creation and maintenance of tradition and the role of the media in controlling perceptions of what matters. In the wake of the pioneering work of literary historians in re-discovering lost works and a Renaissance of black women's writing heralded by books such as Toni Morrison's "Sula" and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple", the contributors to "Changing Our Own Words" explore the relationship of criticism, theory and writing in works by black women. Central to this exploration is the idea of changing words - a recurrent figure in the prose of Zora Neale Hurston. To change words with someone is to exercise a right to speech: a right that black women, at great risk to themselves, claim as a requisite part of claiming a self.