Community and Critique: The Rhetorical Activism of Black American Women's Memory Work

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.

Sara C. VanderHaagen is associate professor of communication at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is author of Children's Biographies of African American Women: Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Agency.