Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Patrick E. Alexander
Second Advisor
Kirsten Dellinger
Third Advisor
Ethel Scurlock
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Even though Naomi Long Madgett’s poetic career spanned over 60 years; even though she was in writing groups and publication circles with some of the twentieth century’s most seminal African American poets; and even though her work has been extensively anthologized, Madgett’s literary career and legacy have yet to be examined as a critical matrix for understanding her as a foundational theorist, artist, and intellectual within Black feminisms. Though Madgett wrote and published during the historical beginnings of the development of Black feminist thought, her work is rarely discussed as essential for understanding and expanding critical and historical notions about Black feminisms. This dissertation seeks to investigate how Naomi Long Madgett’s poetry both contends with and contributes to Black feminist thought and offers a critical lens for exploring late-twentieth and twenty-first century Black feminist literatures.
In four chapters and a conclusion, I demonstrate how conceptual and comparative engagement with Madgett’s work provides tools for encountering anew works by Black feminist writers Phillis Wheatley Peters, Angela Y. Davis, J. California Cooper, Toni Morrison, and Natasha Trethewey. Madgett’s critical and aesthetic representations of Black women’s multivocality and her exploration of Black women’s lived experiences of identity as containing conflicting and sometimes contradictory impulses and definitions are essential to an everevolving engagement with both what Black feminisms are and what they can be. Using Madgett’s poetry as a critical and creative matrix allows for engagement with these works in new ways, and more importantly, expands our understandings of the boundless dynamism of Black feminisms.
Recommended Citation
McComb, Morgan Leigh, ""Plural Aspects of the Self": Naomi Long Madgett's Polyvocal Poetry and Black Feminisms" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2839.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2839