Zora Neale Hurstons of the modern canon

Our wedding photographer is a Mary Cassatt fan.

That's what she told me last week while snapping our engagement photos. She's in the process of pursuing her master's in art history, and happened to mention her disgust over the lack of modernist attention on women. She said that as she worked on her thesis - which involved a lengthy compilation and analysis of all known modernist painters - she grew increasingly frustrated over the inattention shown to talented female artists. "I'm not even a feminist," she said. "I don't really get into that stuff. But, I mean, give the girl a shout-out."

I empathize with that sentiment. Regardless of one's feminist leanings, it's difficult to deny that men have controlled artistic (and probably every other kind - theological, scientific, etc.) canon formation since there were canons to form. Cixous, Kolodny, and Woolf attest to it.

So I read Zora Neale Hurston's essay "What White Publishers Won't Print" with a deep respect for doubly-restricted black women writers. I can't imagine writing in an era that limited - perhaps 'banned,' in many senses - the expressions of not only minorities but also women. I would hope that we are past the point when statements like these are necessary: ". . . it is urgent to realize that the minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem" (1161). But, then again, I don't know.

How many modern minority writers do we read today?

Thinking through the past four years of curriculum, I'm thankful that I've read black writers from many eras of literary history: Equiano, Frederick Douglass, to Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Still, which black (female) authors pop up on current bestseller lists, on Barnes and Noble must-read tables?

Just to feed my curiosity, I'll keep my eyes peeled for the next few days.

. . . Maya Angelou, that's all I got right now.