[Minor edits below.]
Continuing on from yesterday’s post, and the conversation Rachelle Cruz and I are having in that post’s comments section, I wanted to think about publishing venues for women of color. I also want to think about publishing venues by women of color for women of color. Rachelle brought up Aunt Lute, the multicultural women’s press, not specifically a WOC venue, nor is it run by WOC. BUT. Aunt Lute gave us Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and I can’t imagine this world without this volume in it. Aunt Lute and Gloria Anzaldúa also gave us Making Face, Making Soul, and I am wondering about the current viability of a volume of creative and critical WOC perspectives.
Aunt Lute, Nick Carbó, and Eileen Tabios also gave us Babaylan, the first major book in which I was ever published. This was a big deal. A Really Big Deal. At the time, I did not know whether I was publishable (At the time, I didn’t even know if I could graduate from college), nor did I know whether my work was teachable. The thing about anthology is that being included in one, you tend to feel as if you’re a part of a community. I know anthology is all about politics. I know anthology is also derided, because it’s about politics. I know that if I were to propose any kind of anthology now, it’d be rife with politics. I don’t know how to get around that but to try my best to be clear about those politics and inclusion and exclusion. I also know for sure, that as an emerging writer back in the day, I needed the kind of validation and/or affirmation that came with being included, and published in Babaylan.
Now, speaking of woman of color publishing venues, what ever happened to Norma Alarcón’s Third Woman Press, which is one of the early presses that gave us Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, as well as This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
First, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two presses I mention here are/were both Bay Area based. That’s my bias; but it also reminds me of my undergrad years at Berkeley, and being surrounded and so intimidated by this woman of color movement, so angry and radical! So uncompromising! And I was so reticent, insecure, and intimidated (also very tiny and very goth), precisely because I needed that movement in my life in a major way, personally, politically, poetically. I needed these women and their works to smack me (figuratively) into standing up for myself, and speaking for myself.
Also, I wonder who is doing this now in publishing, publishing both creative and critical writings by WOC, about WOC, for WOC. If no one, then can we do this? Or has this time passed? Are we WOC all subsumed into other spaces, or too diverse or too divided to come together now?
Barbara,
You’re right. There are definite gaps for WOC publishing. Are there any WOC literary magazines? I can only think of PMS.
Thanks Rachelle, what am I missing? I assume (perhaps wrongly) that we’d want to create work that is a continuation of that great tradition that includes Borderlands, Dictee, et al. But it feels like the momentum in our communities is either scattered, or coteried, or less ambitious.
I feel the momentum is scattered, partly generational and partly the signs of the time. Or that could be one in the same thing. I attended Trinh T. Minha’s reading of her new book a couple of weeks ago at Moe’s in Berkeley–still need to do a write-up on the event–and the venue was packed, almost standing room only. She was so inspiring, I’m buoyant just remembering that evening. I was encouraged to see so many other readers hungry for her keen criticism and word power. The collective power of WOC writers seems so dispersed, definitely not as concentrated as it was when Moraga and Anzaldúa published La Frontera, and I think because the politics have shifted immensely, or at least how we understand and express those politics. The inequality and marginalisation still exists, but the rhetoric and approach are different. This perhaps is might lend to the loss of momentum. The game’s the same but the plays and strategy are different. Perhaps…
Thanks Rashaan for your comment. Folks, such good dialogue here! Salamat!
Yes, on the times; I think rhetoric is more slippery, such that phrases like “post-racial America” become buzzwords and f—s up folks’ awareness of how it REALLY is. how does this impede us from mobilizing, and how does if affect publishers and editors no longer believing they need be concerned with racial and gender parity, diversity, etc.
Anyway, I wonder if it’s this simple: Moraga and Anzaldúa et al just had to step up themselves, and say, Ima edit this thing, a book I need to see in the world. And Alarcón would have had to step up and say, Ima publish this thing, that I’m not seeing at all or enough in print.