ABSTRACT
Written for the 2003 opening of the “Voicing the Abstract” exhibition featuring young black South African women artists, the South African poet Malika Ndlovu writes in “Out of Nowhere” (Reading 53) about the obstacles that the black woman artist faces. Through imagery of fire and river, she conveys women’s determined struggles for recognition in the midst of subjective and institutional oppression. In so doing, she demands the reader recognize that her identity-“Black, Woman, Artist”— is an intersecting rather than fragmented one. As a form of art activism, Ndlovu uses her poem to raise consciousness of black women in South Africa. As a form of fem inist writing, it resonates with the voice of poet and activist Yosano Akiko (Reading 1), who seeks to celebrate the creative power of women to challenge the injustices they confront. As can be heard through the voices of the two poets whose words bracket almost a century of feminist activism, these tasks are and always will be com plex, conditioned by time and place, and full of possibility. The essays in this final section, remind us that our answers are never final, recuperative hegemonic politics are always possible, and thus, the ongoing feminist epistemological project is import ant to build our capacity to think carefully again and again as we endeavor to change the world and are changed ourselves.
