Blueprints: a way of life Book

I understand that this is one of the earlier books to cover its ground. Wallace is writing about the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles as someone who actually grew up during this period and experienced the zeitgeist. Looking back on it in her own introduction, she says she had an impulse to destroy the book, to stop anyone reading it ever again, a familiar impulse on reading your own earlier bold assertions and analyses which now seem so embarrassingly flawed and limited.I wanted to destroy the book because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black woman writer could ever offer was so palpable in its pages. In obsessively repeating the stereotypes of black women and black men, I wanted to burst free of them forever. However, this has only been slightly more possible for me than it was for Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs and Charlotte Forten. But perhaps if we can begin to claim our own words and our own feelings within the public sphere, we will seize the means of re-producing our own history, and freedom will become a possibility in a sense that it never has been before.Accordingly, though I was moved by many of her insights and the autobiographical details she shares, I often felt that Wallace's criticism of black people and of the Black Power movement was sharp, harsh, rough around the edges. More compassionate analyses can be found in the work of black feminist writing by, for example, bell hooks (especially We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity) and Patricia Hill Collins. Yet Wallace's work shouldn't be overlooked. Her perspective as a witness as well as analyst and intellectual, as deeply involved in her material, is irreplaceable, and later writers stand on her shoulders.