Rereading the Black Naturalist Novel: Ann Petry’s The Street and the Black Women Writers Series

Abstract: This article considers Beacon Press’s Black Women Writers series, inaugurated and edited by Deborah E. McDowell between 1985 and 1993, as a material prerequisite for the outpouring of Black feminist criticism that came to define the 1980s. I argue that that the series empowered Black feminist critics to identify and systematize aesthetic, political, and stylistic features across multiple texts and to recategorize these features, dismissed as genre aberrations when assessed in isolation, as components of a coherent, positively signifying genre system. Specifically, I turn to the Ann Petry’s The Street —the series’ first reprint and arguably its most successful—and proffer its incredible revival as evidence of the material and discursive changes wrought by the Black Women Writers series—changes that have long outlasted the series itself but are directly attributable to it.