Is There No Black in the Woman Question? Virago Press and the Issue of Collective Black Female Authorship

Abstract: This article explores the space of Black women's collective voice within the British feminist printing industry. It employs Western theory (primarily Pierre Bourdieu's fields of production) to reflect how a publishing organ—indebted to forwarding second-wave feminism—could silence the praxis and polyvocality of Britain's burgeoning womanism. Initially conscious of the power dynamic between publisher and author(s)—a power dynamic that is exacerbated by the contested identities of being both Black and woman in Britain—"Is There No Black in the Woman Question?" ends with an excavation into the dissenting potentialities of Black women's lettering. It examines networks of circulation, consecration, and production that operate outside the hegemonic world-system and, undermining the fixity of core-periphery models, highlights Black British women's voices in The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (1985). Consequently, "Is There No Black in the Woman Question?" hopes to offer ways of approaching, reading, and worlding Black texts that acknowledge their existence within and without Western processes. Which is to say, an approach that recognizes the admixture, the diasporic, the conversation: what it means to be both Black and British.