An Interview with Tamura Lomax, Co-Founder and Editor, The Feminist Wire
2016
TL: The founding of The Feminist Wire , affectionately known as TFW ,
came about in 2010 when I was a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University. Second-wave Black feminist literary giant Hortense Spillers was on
my dissertation committee and we would meet almost weekly to discuss
the intersections of her work and mine. We spent that entire summer
together, working though her seminal essays in Black, White, and in
Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (2003). Of particular
import was the essay, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of
Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” a comparative reading of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to
Canada (1976). Among many things, the essay offered a strategy for critically reading, interrogating, writing, and rewriting history. “Changing
the Letter” became the title and theme of my dissertation, as well as the
underlying goal of The Feminist Wire . The idea is that words (“letters”)
can be manipulated (“changed”) in a variety of ways to tell a story that
may be either liberative or oppressive. Therefore, meanings are not fixed,
but are constantly in flux, although sometimes appearing stabilized.
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