ABSTRACT
A few years ago a number of young, brave, Black feminist scholars presented papers at a major conference on African literature, at a major Black institution. We were offering readings, from our angles of seeing, of some texts by some well-known African writers. A highly critical Black male scholar in the audience demanded to know what our theoretical framework was and further commented that what was sorely lacking in our work was just that, a theoretical framework in which he could locate what we were doing. Needless to say our responses were defensive, assertive, challenging. More recently, years after Black feminism had found a voice and practice, another Black male scholar, this time a well-known figure in African-American literary criticism, asserted at a symposium at Oxford University on Africanist Discourse, that Black women do not do theory and that indeed he could point to only three Black women scholars who were doing anything close to theory.4
