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Loretta Gilchrist Woodard
Christian, Barbara (1943–2000)
Literary critic, scholar, and distinguished profes-
sor, Barbara Christian was an important voice in
acknowledging the contribution of black women
to the formation of the African-American liter-
ary canon and to American literature. Born in St.
Thomas, Virgin Islands, Christian studied in the
United States and received her doctorate in English
at Columbia University in 1970. A serious politi-
cal activist, Christian dedicated her life to fighting
openly for and about the rights of black women
and other women of color, yet her importance to
African-American literature and studies responds
to her focus on educating people about the value
and worth of black women writers.
Writers like TONI MORRISON and ALICE WALKER,
who were receiving little critical attention, and
writers like FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER, ZORA
NEALE HURSTON, NELLA LARSEN, and JESSIE FAU-
SET, whose works had been relegated to obscu-
rity, became significant literary figures thanks in
large part to the scholarly work Christian did in
revealing their novels to the literary world in her
book Black Women Novelists: The Development of
a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980). Moreover, Chris-
tian uncovered an important tension between
presenting the voices of black women writers and
critically assessing those writers’ voices without
silencing them—subsuming them into dominant
and often exclusionary modes of abstract philo-
sophical thought. Christian’s numerous books and
articles remain central to studies of African-Amer-
ican women novelists, essayists, and scholars, and
of black feminist criticism, as well as the study of
American literature.
Best known for her critique of literary critics
and the role they play in the reading public’s con-
sumption and exposure inside and outside aca-
demia to black women’s works, Christian charged
that literary critics were becoming elitist and ex-
clusionary—manipulating and using language
in ways that silenced the voices of both black
women writers and the scholars who refused to
participate in those normalizing discourses. In
“The Race for Theory” (1987), she examines what
she terms “the takeover” of the literary world by
“Western Philosophers from the old literary elite”
who turned literary works representing a writer’s
labor-intensive creative and artistic expression
into texts (products devoid of creative meaning)
made to fit into scripted, self-serving vehicles for
furthering the critics’ own professional purposes.
In this essay, Christian articulates a presence for
the voices of those writers, particularly black
women writers and other women writers of color,
whose works were once neglected by the literary
elite and then misappropriated for academic and
personal gain.
Christian extends her discussion of what she
sees as the disturbing pattern in literary criti-
cism to the larger project of the struggle of black
women for recognition of their presence in both
the American and the African-American literary
canon and in the larger world. As a central work
of black feminist criticism, a literary and social
movement raising the awareness and presence of
black women’s literature and thought, Christian’s
landmark collection, Black Feminist Criticism: Per-
spectives on Black Women Writers (1985), examines
creative voices of black women from the 19th and
20th centuries by illuminating the social and cul-
tural matrices from which these creative voices
arise. Christian calls for critical approaches that
come from the work itself—approaches examin-
ing the realities of these works’ contexts as theyChristian, Barbara 103