| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. By Cheryl A. Wall. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv, 309 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2927-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5586-3.)

Cheryl A. Wall illustrates and analyzes the ways that American black women writers have constructed literary genealogies and cultural histories from which they would descend and, in the case of gendered ideological strictures, dissent. Wall attends to crossover and academically embedded texts, including Alice Walker's essays on—and in the manner of—strong black women whom she dubs womanist. As writer-critics, such women produce literary canon and provide access to the craft and the structures of feeling of black vernacular culture. Exemplary here is Toni Morrison, novelist, essayist, and one-time Random House editor of many writers who wrote and, in some cases, embodied the individual and cultural memories that Wall's black womanist writers have transformed into art that is at once original and quotational.

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