ABSTRACT
TL: The founding of The Feminist Wire , affectionately known as TFW , came about in 2010 when I was a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University. Second-wave Black feminist literary giant Hortense Spillers was on my dissertation committee and we would meet almost weekly to discuss the intersections of her work and mine. We spent that entire summer together, working though her seminal essays in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003). Of particular import was the essay, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” a comparative reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976). Among many things, the essay offered a strategy for critically reading, interrogating, writing, and rewriting history. “Changing the Letter” became the title and theme of my dissertation, as well as the underlying goal of The Feminist Wire . The idea is that words (“letters”) can be manipulated (“changed”) in a variety of ways to tell a story that may be either liberative or oppressive. Therefore, meanings are not fixed, but are constantly in flux, although sometimes appearing stabilized.
