ABOUT THIS BOOK

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging.

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eve Dunbar is the Jean Webster Professor of English at Vassar College. She is author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World and coeditor of African American Literature in Transition: 1930–1940.

REVIEWS

"Eve Dunbar’s exploration of radical satisfaction provides a new way to conceptualize Black female subjectivity outside the limits of racial inclusion. In a series of bold, incisive readings, she analyzes examples of agency and joy that defy conventional narratives of progress. This book provides a necessary reorientation to the power of monstrous work and satisfaction." —Stephanie Li, author of Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

"Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction brilliantly reveals how midcentury Black women writers undertook the ‘monstrous work’ of refusing an assumed good, integration, in favor of the kind of fugitive and ephemeral pleasures that center and affirm Black life and Black women’s daily joy: radical satisfaction. Eve Dunbar’s incisive, eloquent analysis shows how these authors endeavored to uncover alternative paths to existence, autonomy, and fulfillment than those offered by liberal democratic humanism. Dunbar’s critical labor in this volume reminds us that Black women artists and thinkers have always cast a skeptical eye at the facile promises of inclusion and insisted that we consider and imagine our own satisfaction otherwise." —Candice M. Jenkins, author of Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh

"Edifying and incisive, this impresses." —Publishers Weekly

— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Radical Satisfaction of Black Women’s Monstrous Work

1. Ugly Work: Alterity and the “Ugly Work” of Black Life

2. Home Work: Black Domestic Liberation

3. Domestic Work: Dangerous Workers and Black Sociality

4. Line Work: Human–Nonhuman Crossings and New Routes to Black Satisfaction

Coda: The Revenant

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index