I think Cooper was saying that (white) writers who simply "write to please" or those who "write because they please" had "nothing to prove" because African American authors did not have the privilege of writing for the sole purpose of pleasing (Cooper 380). Since black writers had no existing literary tradition at the time Cooper wrote her essay, there was no way for a black writer to put out his or her work into the white mainstream literary world and be taken seriously or be seen as important as other white authors who were their contemporaries. Black authors, like Cooper, had no choice but to have "a point to prove or a mission to accomplish" because the sole act of being a minority and offering up ideas to an oppressive society was to be subversive and to have a purpose.
In this essay, Cooper wrote a lot about how powerful it is to be an author and what it means to have the freedom to be an author. She says that first "a sense of freedom in mind as well as in body is necessary" in the "pursuit of the beautiful" (382). This is a plea for other black authors to recognize that they are at a disadvantage because of a privilege they don't have, but to not let that privilege discourage their art or their subversiveness. In fact, their disadvantage should be something that fuels black writers' desire to dismantle and call out their own oppression.
After reading Cooper, I began thinking a lot about this idea of the effect of privilege on a writer and what sort of agency it gives them. I agree with you that Cooper is arguing that black authors have been creatively held back due to their oppression in America. I loved the passage in which she writes, "The fact is, a sense of freedom in mind as well as in body is necessary to the appreciative and inspiring pursuit of the beautiful"(382). I wonder though, if every writer should experience some sort of oppression or repression before they can write with depth. Difficult circumstances have been the product of great works of literature, as evident in advocacy writers like Dickens and Sinclair. This makes me wonder what kind of oppression is conducive to good writing.
ReplyDeleteVirginia Woolf addressed the issue of female oppression in "A Room of One's Own," where she creates the image of "Shakespeare's sister." This character functions to question the male-dominated literary history in which Woolf was forced to operate. She posited that if Shakespeare's sister were given a room of her own, access to her own money, and a sense of identity; history might have been very different.
Women, like blacks in America, have historically been extremely limited, forced to play by the games set up by their "superior" counterparts. This creates an inevitable shade of derision in their writing. So I guess what my conclusion to this power and privilege dilema might be, is that literature created out of oppression is only effective and can be artistic if that oppression is not linked to identity. When identity and the stability of self is in question, like in the case of women and black writers not too many decades ago, the writing suffers because the oppression is so ingrained that it bleeds through the text and damages the artistic argument.