“As Shelters Against the Cold”: Women Writers of the Black Arts and Chicano Movements, 1965-1978

This dissertation explores the women writers of the Black Arts and Chicano movements in order to expose the ways these women used their writing both as literary output and political activism. While other studies have focused on either the Black Arts or Chicano movements, this (to my knowledge) is the first study to discuss them in tandem. This approach allows for more fully nuanced discussion of the women writers and points us towards areas of commonality and well as difference.

As an interdisciplinary project, “As Shelters Against the Cold”: Women Writers of the Black Arts and Chicano Movements, 1965-1978, draws on literature & literary criticism, historical analysis, legal studies and sociology as part of my effort to present the literature as well as the activist practices of these women. By contextualizing the writing within the larger frameworks of the political milieu, historical exigencies and legal structures bounding both racial and feminist discourse, the women writers are grounded within struggles for social and political justice and the establishment of new American literary canons. This project thus exposes the varied responses to ethnic/racial nationalisms inherent in the Black Power and Chicano movements and the construction of ground-breaking and novel feminist discourses that inform subsequent generations of women writers.