Charting the work of Black women writers and choreographers

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Nicole Morris Johnson, PhD, an assistant professor of English, was a theater artist before becoming a University at Buffalo faculty member. While rewarding, working in Los Angeles raised questions in Morris Johnson about the creative process, and why the storytelling of her stage profession differed so much from what she was experiencing through literature.

Before Los Angeles, Morris Johnson had trained in various traditions, including the Jazz Actors method, which emerged during the Black Arts movement in Harlem and moved South through the work of its creator Ernie McClintock.

“As a member of that theatre company, I found that there was an incredible amount of room for the entire creative team to contribute their insights to each project,” says Morris Johnson. “The Los Angeles theater world at the time had a relationship with film and television that not only shaped that experience differently but raised questions for me about the importance of the expressive liberation I knew from my prior theater experience that was not available in those spaces.”

Frequenting a local used bookshop, “a refuge and a resource,” as she says, Morris Johnson found a collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s letters and a Hurston biography by Valerie Boyd.

Hurston, an anthropologist as well as a prolific writer, was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but as a Southerner she was an anomaly within that movement, according to Morris Johnson. Hurston inspired Morris Johnson’s career shift away from the stage and toward literary studies, but those early questions about writing and creativity and the impact of geographical location remained with her through graduate school.

“Aside from Hurston’s incredible ability to tell stories from the stage to the page that center her insights and experiences, I was also intrigued by how she straddled and built creative bridges between worlds: anthropology and the Harlem Renaissance; North and South; U.S. South and Caribbean,” she says.

In graduate school, Morris Johnson was introduced to creolization theory, which seemed to offer a way to make sense for how artists like Hurston and others processed cross-cultural contact.

But creolization theory was not enough.

“The insights of women such as Hurston were markedly absent from the theoretical conversation,” she says. “And placing these artists into this conversation become the focus of my dissertation.”

That broke everything open for Morris Johnson and led to her new book, “The Souths in Her: Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation” (Columbia University Press), which examines various frameworks such as creolization theory and why they prove to be an inadequate approach for examining women’s creative expression.

“The book argues that each artist has an encounter with unfamiliar cultural and expressive elements in the U.S. and Caribbean Souths that catalyzes the creation of innovative modes of written and choreographed expression,” says Morris Johnson. “Taken together, their breakthroughs reveal an expressive arc across the 20th century that teaches us a great deal about what escapes our interpretive frames and opens new vistas for our understanding of literature and performance across the Circum-Atlantic.”

In addition to Hurston, Morris Johnson looks at Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Ntozake Shange, Maryse Condé, and Jamaica Kincaid.

For each of the artists in the book, the South as landscape represents not just physical geography, but political and social geographies as well.

“These artists share a history of confrontations with the multiple tensions that Souths as idiom present,” Morris Johnson writes in the book. “Their varied positions enable an examination of the ways that these tensions play out between Black women artists and a number of intellectual and artistic movements.”

“The Souths in Her” expands readers’ understanding and appreciation of American literature by moving beyond the limitations of established interpretations to instead look at and explore a comprehensive landscape that includes entire traditions otherwise omitted from existing frameworks.

“We have to question our frameworks,” says Morris Johnson. “What falls out? What aren’t we seeing? And how do the theories that guide our interpretations surrounding a body of work impact all of this?

“My book doesn’t complete the portrait, but I hope it provides a more expansive paradigm for thinking about landscape and expressive innovation.”