front cover of
"After Mecca"
Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
Clarke, Cheryl
Rutgers University Press, 2004
The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. 

In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. 

She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.
 
Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory. 
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Beyond the Gibson Girl
Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915
Martha H. Patterson
University of Illinois Press, 2005

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other “new” conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics," the "New South," and the "New China."

As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development, and (for writers of color) an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory term of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, modern energy, and modern cure, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay.

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Black Resonance
Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature
Lordi, Emily J.
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.

Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.

The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

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Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory
(Un)Becoming the Subject
Kevin Everod Quashie
Rutgers University Press, 2004

 In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the “girlfriend” as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes.

The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

[more]

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Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin
Trudier Harris
University of Tennessee Press, 1985
In James Baldwin's fiction, according to Trudier Harris, black women are conceptually limited figures until their author ceases to measure them by standards of the community fundamentalist church. Harris analyzes works written over a thirty-year period to show how Baldwin's development of female character progresses through time.

Black women in the early fiction, responding to their elders as well as to religious influences, see their lives in terms of duty as wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. Failure in any of these roles leads to guilt feelings and the expectation of damnation. In later works, Baldwin adopts a new point of view, acknowledging complex extenuating circumstances in lieu of pronouncing moral judgement. Female characters in works written at this stage eventually come to believe that the church affords no comfort.

Baldwin subsequently makes villains of some female churchgoers, and caring women who do not attend church become his most attractive characters. Still later in Baldwin's career, a woman who frees herself of guilt by moving completely beyond the church attains greater contentment than almost all of her counterparts in the earlier works.  
[more]

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Black Women Writing Autobiography
A Tradition Within a Tradition
Joanne Braxton
Temple University Press, 1990
"In this illuminating study Joanne Braxton shows the continuity and tradition in the writing of Afra-American women. An important work for teachers and students of Literature, History, and Women's Studies." --Gerda Lerner "As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known." Joanne Braxton argues for a redefinition of the genre of black American autobiography to include the images of women as well as their memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, and journals--as a corrective to both black and feminist literary criticism. Beginning with slave narratives and concluding with modern autobiography, she deals with individual works as representing stages in a continuum and situates these works in the context of other writings by both black and white writers. Braxton demonstrates that the criteria used to define the slave narrative genre are inadequate for analyzing Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs's pseudonymously published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). She examines "sass" as a mode of women's discourse and a weapon of self-defense, and she introduces the "outraged mother" as a parallel to the articulate hero archetype. Not even emancipation authorized black women to define themselves or address an audience. Late-nineteenth-century accounts in the form of confessional spiritual autobiographies, travelogue/adventure stories, and slave memoirs enabled such women as Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Elizabeth Keckley, Susie King Taylor, as well as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to tell their own extraordinary stories and to shed light on the thousands of lives obscured by illiteracy and sexual and racial oppression. In her diaries, Charlotte Forten Grimké, the gifted poet, epitomizes the problems faced by a well-educated, extremely articulate black woman attempting to find a public voice in America. Moving into the twentieth century, Braxton analyzes the memoir of Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching activist, and the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson. They represent the first generation of black female autobiographers who did not continually come into contact with former slaves and who transcended the essential struggle for survival that occupied earlier writings. For the contemporary black woman autobiographer, the quest for personal fulfillment is the central theme. Braxton concludes with Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1996), which represents the black woman of the 1960s who has found the place to recreate the self in her own image--the place all the others had been searching for. "Braxton's book is scrupulously researched. She has been creative in finding resources and courageous in analyzing and interpreting her finds. This is the word of a diligent mind. The material is mountainous, yet the book sings. Braxton is a poet. Thank goodness." --Maya Angelou "Joanne Braxton's essays on black women's autobiographies delineate and illuminate the personal and historical dimension of an important literary tradition. Emphasizing the distinct character of Afra-American women's experience and relations with each other, she ground their writing of their lives in the struggles and triumphs of the lives they actually led." --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese "In this compelling and lucid study examining the content, context, and continuum of black women autobiographers, Braxton clears the place for it in the curriculum: at the center of black and feminist studies." --Paula Giddings "This is the fullest and most sympathetic study of black American autobiographers I know. By paying close attention to private and public history, to social networks and literary kinships, to narrative structures and patterns of imagery, Braxton leads her readers to see the black woman 'at the center of her own [written] experiences.' At once scholarly and passionate, Braxton's critique will immediately secure her a place among the leading analysts of black American autobiography." --Albert E. Stone "A highly readable and original contribution to the important fields of Afro-American studies, feminist criticism, and autobiographical narrative." --Elaine Showalter "Rich in empathy and insight, Joanne M. Braxton's trailblazing study attends to both the textual and historical dimensions of a powerful literary inheritance. She brings to bear a keen sense of the departures and continuities of which any tradition consists; and an appreciation of the distinctive Afro-American dynamic between literary convention and a vernacular substrate. Braxton doesn't just read--she listens." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Joanne Braxton makes a unique contribution to the scholarship of American autobiography. Her focus on the outraged mother as a figure of rebellion is a significant challenge to our conventional understanding of autobiographical acts." --Hazel Carby "This is the most inclusive and thoughtful literary history of black American women's autobiography in existence…It is not just a collection of essays; it is well knit together and displays multiple traditions as they evolved and are in the process of evolving still." --William L. Andrews "This book marks another milestone in the critical appraisal of American autobiographical writings. In tracing the evolution of a tradition of black women in autobiography in America, Braxton takes us on the first journey of this kind: the black American woman's search for a dignified, self-defining identity through the rejection of traditional female roles. This book sets the tone for future studies of black women's autobiographies." --Nellie McKay
[more]

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Bridging The Americas
The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones
Stelamaris Coser
Temple University Press, 1994

A literary study of three important black women writers, this book examines the "inter-American" characteristics in the work of Marshall, Morrison, and Jones, including detailed discussions of Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Jones's Corregidora and Song of Anninho, and Marshall's The Chose Place, The Timeless People.

Coser defines the inter-American characteristics in these authors' novels as a connection based on a common African heritage and a shared legacy of colonialism and racism. These three authors redefine the boundaries between the Americas, bridging the "extended Caribbean" that stretches from the U.S. Atlantic coast to Brazil. Their work reinterprets ethnic and sexual identity. Issues of race, class, and nationality overlap. History and identity are reinvented. 

To explore the collective forms of resistance and cultural processes in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, Coser also makes provocative connections between the visibility of black women writers and the popularity of male Latin American novelists like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquéz.

[more]

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Changing Our Own Words
Wall, Cheryl A
Rutgers University Press, 1991
ssays on criticism, theory, and writing by Black women
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Changing the Subject
Writing Women across the African Diaspora
K. Merinda Simmons
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
In Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora, K. Merinda Simmons argues that, in first-person narratives about women of color, contexts of migration illuminate constructions of gender and labor. These constructions and migrations suggest that the oft-employed notion of “authenticity” is not as useful a classification as many feminist and postcolonial scholars have assumed. Instead of relying on so-called authentic feminist journeys and heroines for her analysis, Simmons calls for a self-reflexive scholarship that takes seriously the scholar’s own role in constructing the subject.
The starting point for this study is the nineteenth-century Caribbean narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831). Simmons puts Prince’s narrative in conversation with three twentieth-century novels: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. She incorporates autobiography theory to shift the critical focus from the object of study—slave histories—to the ways people talk about those histories and to the guiding interests of such discourses. In its reframing of women’s migration narratives, Simmons’s study unsettles theoretical certainties and disturbs the very notion of a cohesive diaspora.
[more]

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Crossing Borders through Folklore
African American Women's Fiction and Art
Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Examining works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, this innovative book frames black women's aesthetic sensibilities across art forms. Investigating the relationship between vernacular folk culture and formal expression, this study establishes how each of the four artists engaged the identity issues of the 1960s and used folklore as a strategy for crossing borders in the works they created during the following two decades.

As a dynamic, open-ended process, folklore historically has enabled African-descended people to establish differential identity, resist dominance, and affirm group solidarity. This book documents the use of expressive forms of folklore in the fiction of Morrison and Marshall and the use of material forms of folklore in the visual representations of Ringgold and Saar. Offering a conceptual paradigm of a folk aesthetic to designate the practices these women use to revise and reverse meanings—especially meanings imposed on images such as Aunt Jemima and Sambo—Crossing Borders through Folklore explains how these artists locate sites of intervention and reconnection. From these sites, in keeping with the descriptive and prescriptive formulations for art during the sixties, Morrison, Marshall, Ringgold, and Saar articulate new dimensions of consciousness and creatively theorize identity.

Crossing Borders through Folklore is a significant and creative contribution to scholarship in both established and still- emerging fields. This volume also demonstrates how recent theorizing across scholarly disciplines has created elastic metaphors that can be used to clarify a number of issues. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this study will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including African American literature, art history, women's studies, diaspora studies, and cultural studies.

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"Doers of the Word"
African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880)
Peterson, Carla L
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James —"doers of the word"— nineteenth-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the United States. They preached, lectured, and wrote on issues of religious evangelicism, abolition, racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights, thereby defining themselves as public intellectuals. 

In situating these women within the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon. In particular, the book examines the ways in which this Northern black population, despite its heterogeneity, came together and established social organizations that would facilitate community empowerment; yet Peterson's analysis also acknowledges, and seeks to explain, the highly complex relationship of black women to these institutions, a relationship that rendered their stance as public intellectuals all the more bold and defiant.

Peterson begins her study in the 1830s, when a substantial body of oratory and writing by black women first emerged, and traces the development of this writing through the shifting political climate up to the end of Reconstruction. She builds her analyses upon Foucault's interdisciplinary model of discourse with an explicitly feminist approach, drawing upon sermons, spiritual autobiographies, travel and slave narratives, journalism, essays, poetry, speeches, and fiction. From these, Peterson is able to answer several key questions. First, what empowered these women to act, to speak out, and to write? Why, and in what ways, were they marginalized within both the African-American and larger American communities? Where did they act, speak, and write from?
[more]

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The Fiction of Gloria Naylor
Houses and Spaces of Resistance
Maxine Lavon Montgomery
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

The Fiction of Gloria Naylor is one of the very first critical studies of this acclaimed writer. Including an insightful interview with Naylor
and focusing on her first four novels, the book situates various acts of insurgency throughout her work within a larger framework of African American opposition to hegemonic authority. But what truly distinguishes this volume is its engagement with African American vernacular forms and twentieth-century political movements.

In her provocative analysis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery argues that Naylor constantly attempts to reconfigure the home and homespace to be more conducive to black self-actualization, thus providing a stark contrast to a dominant white patriarchy evident in a broader public sphere. Employing a postcolonial and feminist theoretical framework to analyze Naylor’s evolving body of work, Montgomery pays particular attention to black slave historiography, tales of conjure, trickster lore, and oral devices involving masking, word play, and code-switching—the vernacular strategies that have catapulted Naylor to the vanguard of contemporary African American letters.

Montgomery argues for the existence of home as a place that is not exclusively architectural or geographic in nature. She posits that in Naylor’s writings, home exists as an intermediate space embedded in cultural memory and encoded in the vernacular. Home closely resembles a highly symbolic, signifying system bound with vexed issues of racial sovereignty as well as literary authority. Through a reinscription of the subversive, frequently clandestine acts of resistance on the part of the border subject—those outside the dominant
culture—Naylor recasts space in such a way as to undermine reader expectation and destabilize established models of dominance, influence, and control.

Thoroughly researched and sophisticated in its approach, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor will be essential reading for scholars and students of African American, American, and Africana Literary and Cultural studies.

[more]

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The Freedom to Remember
Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction
Mitchell, Angelyn
Rutgers University Press, 2002

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child.

Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as “liberatory narratives.” These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the “safe” vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

[more]

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From Mammies to Militants
Domestics in Black American Literature from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Morrison
Trudier Harris
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Welfare queen, hot momma, unwed mother: these stereotypes of Black women share their historical conception in the image of the Black woman as domestic. Focusing on the issue of stereotypes, the new edition of Trudier Harris’s classic 1982 study From Mammies to Militants examines the position of the domestic in Black American literature with a new afterword bringing her analysis into the present.

From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors.

Harris combines folkloristic, sociological, historical, and psychological analyses with literary ones, drawing on her own interviews with Black women who worked as domestics. She explores the differences between Northern and Southern maids and between “mammy” and “militant.” Her invaluable book provides a sweeping exploration of Black American writers of the twentieth century, with extended discussion of works by Charles Chesnutt, Kristin Hunter, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, Alice Childress, John A. Williams, Douglas Turner Ward, Barbara Woods, Ted Shine, and Ed Bullins. Often privileging political statements over realistic characterization in the design of their texts, the authors in Harris’s study urged Black Americans to take action to change their powerless conditions, politely if possible, violently if necessary. Through their commitment to improving the conditions of Black people in America, these writers demonstrate the connectedness of art and politics.

In her new afterword, “From Militants to Movie Stars,” Harris looks at domestic workers in African American literature after the original publication of her book in 1982. Exploring five subsequent literary treatments of Black domestic workers from Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying to Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Harris tracks how the landscape of representation of domestic workers has broken with tradition and continues to transform into something entirely new.
 
[more]

front cover of From Mammies to Militants
From Mammies to Militants
Domestics in Black American Literature from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Morrison
Trudier Harris
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Welfare queen, hot momma, unwed mother: these stereotypes of Black women share their historical conception in the image of the Black woman as domestic. Focusing on the issue of stereotypes, the new edition of Trudier Harris’s classic 1982 study From Mammies to Militants examines the position of the domestic in Black American literature with a new afterword bringing her analysis into the present.

From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors.

Harris combines folkloristic, sociological, historical, and psychological analyses with literary ones, drawing on her own interviews with Black women who worked as domestics. She explores the differences between Northern and Southern maids and between “mammy” and “militant.” Her invaluable book provides a sweeping exploration of Black American writers of the twentieth century, with extended discussion of works by Charles Chesnutt, Kristin Hunter, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, Alice Childress, John A. Williams, Douglas Turner Ward, Barbara Woods, Ted Shine, and Ed Bullins. Often privileging political statements over realistic characterization in the design of their texts, the authors in Harris’s study urged Black Americans to take action to change their powerless conditions, politely if possible, violently if necessary. Through their commitment to improving the conditions of Black people in America, these writers demonstrate the connectedness of art and politics.

In her new afterword, “From Militants to Movie Stars,” Harris looks at domestic workers in African American literature after the original publication of her book in 1982. Exploring five subsequent literary treatments of Black domestic workers from Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying to Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Harris tracks how the landscape of representation of domestic workers has broken with tradition and continues to transform into something entirely new.
 
[more]

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From Slave Cabins to the White House
Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
Koritha Mitchell
University of Illinois Press, 2021

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."

Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.

Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

[more]

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Games of Property
Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses
Thadious M. Davis
Duke University Press, 2003
In Games of Property, distinguished critic Thadious M. Davis provides a dazzling new interpretation of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Davis argues that in its unrelenting attention to issues related to the ownership of land and people, Go Down, Moses ranks among Faulkner’s finest and most accomplished works. Bringing together law, social history, game theory, and feminist critiques, she shows that the book is unified by games—fox hunting, gambling with cards and dice, racing—and, like the law, games are rule-dependent forms of social control and commentary. She illuminates the dual focus in Go Down, Moses on property and ownership on the one hand and on masculine sport and social ritual on the other. Games of Property is a masterful contribution to understandings of Faulkner’s fiction and the power and scope of property law.
[more]

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Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston
Susan E Meisenhelder
University of Alabama Press, 2001
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick examines the ways Zora Neale Hurston circumvented the constraints of the white publishing world and a predominantly white readership to critique white culture and its effects on the black community. A number of critics have concluded that Hurston simply capitulated to external demands, writing stories white people wanted to hear. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, however, argues that Hurston’s response to her situation is much more sophisticated than her detractors recognized. Meisenhelder suggests, in fact, that Hurston’s work, both fictional and anthropological, constitutes an extended critique of the values of white culture and a rejection of white models for black people. Repeatedly, Hurston’s work shows the diverse effects that traditional white values, including class divisions and gender imbalances, have on blacks.
 
[more]

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Inventing Black Women
African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000
Ajuan Maria Mance
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women over the nearly 125 years since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and many others.

Ajuan Maria Mance establishes that the history of African American women's poetry revolves around the struggle of the Black female poet against two marginalizing forces: the widespread association of womanhood with the figure of the middle-class, white female; and the similar association of Blackness with the figure of the African American male. In so doing, she looks closely at the major trends in Black women's poetry during each of four critical moments in African American literary history: the post- Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1910; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the Black Arts Movement from 1965 to 1975; and the late twentieth century from 1975 to 2000.

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Literary Sisters
Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance
Mitchell, Verner D
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West led a charmed life in many respects. Born into a distinguished Boston family, she appeared in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, then lived in the Soviet Union with a group that included Langston Hughes, to whom she proposed marriage. She later became friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who encouraged her to finish her second novel, The Wedding, which became the octogenarian author’s first bestseller.

Literary Sisters reveals a different side of West’s personal and professional lives—her struggles for recognition outside of the traditional literary establishment, and her collaborations with talented African American women writers, artists, and performers who faced these same problems. West and her “literary sisters”—women like Zora Neale Hurston and West’s cousin, poet Helene Johnson—created an emotional support network that also aided in promoting, publishing, and performing their respective works. Integrating rare photos, letters, and archival materials from West’s life, Literary Sisters is not only a groundbreaking biography of an increasingly important author but also a vivid portrait of a pivotal moment for African American women in the arts.

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Mammy
A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 2008
"An engaging study of 'mammy,' the provocative figure of the African American nanny, cook, and housekeeper in white households . . . Wallace-Sanders reveals . . . disturbing innuendos of mammy still relevant today, in particular the elevation in value of raising others' children at the expense of one's own."
---Choice

"In this insightful analysis of representations of mammy, Wallace-Sanders skillfully illustrates how this core icon of Black womanhood has figured prominently in upholding hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the United States. Far from being a timeless, natural, benign image of domesticity, the idealized mammy figure was repeatedly reworked to accommodate varying configurations of racial rule. No one reading this book will be able to see Gone with the Wind in the same way ever again."
---Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland

"Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' interdisciplinary approach is first-rate. This expansive and engaging book should appeal to students and scholars in American studies, African American studies, and women's studies."
---Thadious Davis, The University of Pennsylvania

Her cheerful smile and bright eyes gaze out from the covers of old cookbooks, song sheets, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars, and she has long been a prominent figure in fiction, film, television, and folk art. She is Mammy, a figure whose provocative hold on the American psyche has persisted since before the Civil War.

But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? Her large, dark body and her round smiling face tower over our imaginations to such an extent that more accurate representations of African American women wither in her shadow. Mammy's stereotypical attributes---a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit acceptance of her own inferiority and her devotion to white children---all point to a long-lasting and troubled confluence of racism, sexism, and southern nostalgia.

This groundbreaking book traces the mammy figure and what it has symbolized at various historical moments that are linked to phases in America's racial consciousness. The author shows how representations of Mammy have loomed over the American literary and cultural imagination, an influence so pervasive that only a comprehensive and integrated approach of this kind can do it justice.

The book's many illustrations trace representations of the mammy figure from the nineteenth century to the present, as she has been depicted in advertising, book illustrations, kitchen figurines, and dolls. The author also surveys the rich and previously unmined history of the responses of African American artists to the black mammy stereotype, including contemporary reframings by artists Betye Saar, Michael Ray Charles, and Joyce Scott.

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is editor of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.

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Moorings and Metaphors
Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature
Holloway, Karla F
Rutgers University Press, 1991
Moorings and Metaphors is one of the first studies to examine the ways that cultural tradition is reflected in the language and figures of black women's writing. In a discussion that includes the works of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, Buchi Emecheta, Octavia Butler, Efua Sutherland, and Gayl Jones, and with a particular focus on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Flora Nwapa's Efuru, Holloway follows the narrative structures, language, and figurative metaphors of West African goddesses and African-American ancestors as they weave through the pages of these writers' fiction. She explores what she would call the cultural and gendered essence of contemporary literature that has grown out of the African diaspora.

Proceeding from a consideration of the imaginative textual languages of contemporary African-American and West African writers, Holloway asserts the intertextuality of black women's literature across two continents. She argues the subtext of culture as the source of metaphor and language, analyzes narrative structures and linguistic processes, and develops a combined theoretical/critical apparatus and vocabulary for interpreting these writers' works. The cultural sources and spiritual considerations that inhere in these textual languages are discussed within the framework Holloway employs of patterns of revision, (re)membrance, and recursion--all of which are vehicles for expressive modes inscribed at the narrative level. Her critical reading of contemporary black women's writing in the United States and West Africa is unique, radical, and sure to be controversial.
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Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women
Simone A. James Alexander
University of Missouri Press, 2000

Focusing on specific texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, and Paule Marshall, this fascinating study explores the intricate trichotomous relationship between the mother (biological or surrogate), the motherlands Africa and the Caribbean, and the mothercountry represented by England, France, and/or North America. The mother-daughter relationships in the works discussed address the complex, conflicting notions of motherhood that exist within this trichotomy. Although mothering is usually socialized as a welcoming, nurturing notion, Alexander argues that alongside this nurturing notion there exists much conflict. Specifically, she argues that the mother-daughter relationship, plagued with ambivalence, is often further conflicted by colonialism or colonial intervention from the "other," the colonial mothercountry.

Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women offers an overview of Caribbean women's writings from the 1990s, focusing on the personal relationships these three authors have had with their mothers and/or motherlands to highlight links, despite social, cultural, geographical, and political differences, among Afro-Caribbean women and their writings. Alexander traces acts of resistance, which facilitate the (re)writing/righting of the literary canon and the conception of a "newly created genre" and a "womanist" tradition through fictional narratives with autobiographical components.

Exploring the complex and ambiguous mother-daughter relationship, she examines the connection between the mother and the mother's land. In addition, Alexander addresses the ways in which the absence of a mother can send an individual on a desperate quest for selfhood and a home space. This quest forces and forges the creation of an imagined homeland and the re-validation of "old ways and cultures" preserved by the mother. Creating such an imagined homeland enables the individual to acquire "wholeness," which permits a spiritual return to the motherland, Africa via the Caribbean. This spiritual return or homecoming, through the living and practicing of the old culture, makes possible the acceptance and celebration of the mother's land.

Alexander concludes that the mothers created by these authors are the source of diasporic connections and continuities. Writing/righting black women's histories as Kincaid, Condé, and Marshall have done provides a clearing, a space, a mother's land, for black women. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women will be of great interest to all teachers and students of women's studies, African American studies, Caribbean literature, and diasporic literatures.

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Mutha Is Half a Word
Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture
L. H. Stallings
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Mutha’ is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females’ subjectivities in Black women’s culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.  L. H. Stallings offers distinct close readings of understudied African American women’s texts through a critical engagement with folklore and queer theory. To date, most studies on the trickster figure have rarely reflected the boldness and daring of the figure itself. Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis. Mutha’ is Half a Word strives to break that convention.
 
This book provides a much-needed analysis of trickster tradition in regard to gender, sexuality, and Black female sexual desire. It is the only study to focus specifically on trickster figures and African American female culture. In addition, it contributes to conversations regarding the cultural representation of Black female desire in ways that are not strategically invested in heteronormative binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. The study is distinctly different because it explores folklore, vernacular, and trickster strategies of queerness alongside theories of queer studies to create new readings of desire in literary texts, hip-hop and neo-soul music, and comedic performances by Black females.
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Negotiating Difference
Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality
Michael Awkward
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Encamped within the limits of experience and "authenticity," critics today often stake out their positions according to race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and vigilantly guard the boundaries against any incursions into their privileged territory. In this book, Michael Awkward raids the borders of contemporary criticism to show how debilitating such "protectionist" stances can be and how much might be gained by crossing our cultural boundaries.

From Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It to Michael Jackson's physical transmutations, from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to August Wilson's Fences, from male scholars' investments in feminism to white scholars' in black texts—Awkward explores cultural moments that challenge the exclusive critical authority of race and gender. In each instance he confronts the question: What do artists, scholars, and others concerned with representations of Afro-American life make of the view that gender, race, and sexuality circumscribe their own and others' lives and narratives? Throughout he demonstrates the perils and merits of the sort of "boundary crossing" this book ultimately makes: a black male feminism.

In pursuing a black male feminist criticism, Awkward's study acknowledges the complexities of interpretation in an age when a variety of powerful discourses have proliferated on the subject of racial, gendered, and sexual difference; at the same time, it identifies this proliferation as an opportunity to negotiate seemingly fixed cultural and critical positions.
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New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000
Barbara Christian. Edited by Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene Keizer
University of Illinois Press, 2007

A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words

New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.

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Next to the Color Line
Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois
Susan Gillman
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Although W. E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections between the “Negro question” that defined so much of his intellectual life and the “woman question” that engaged writers and feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that within Du Bois’s work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects race, gender, sexuality, and justice.This provocative collection investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but also to demonstrate his relevance for today’s scholarly and political concerns.Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California; Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College; Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U.Susan Gillman is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.
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Portraits of the New Negro Woman
Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance
Cherene M. Sherrard-Johnson
Rutgers University Press, 2007

Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta’s frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries.

In this engaging narrative, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

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Recovering the Black Female Body
Self-Representation by African American Women
Edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D Dickerson
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Despite the recent flood of scholarly work investigating the interrelated issues of race, gender, and representation, little has been written about black women’s depictions of their own bodies. Both past and present-day American cultural discourse has attempted either to hypereroticize the black female body or make it a site of impropriety and crime.

The essays in this volume focus on how African American women, from the nineteenth century to the present, have represented their physical selves in opposition to the distorted vision of others. Contributors attempt to  “recover” the black female body in two ways: they explore how dominant historical images have mediated black female identity, and they analyze how black women have resisted often demeaning popular cultural perceptions in favor of more diverse, subtle presentations of self.   

The pieces in this book—all of them published here for the first time—address a wide range of topics, from antebellum American poetry to nineteenth-century African American actors, and twentieth-century pulp fiction.

Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women’s attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.

Contributors are Margaret Bass, Dorri Rabung Beam, Michael Bennett, Jacqueline E. Brady, Daphne A. Brooks, Vanessa D. Dickerson, Meredith Goldsmith, Yvette Louis, Ajuan Maria Mance, Noliwe Rooks, Mark Winokur, and Doris Witt. This book also contains a foreword by Carla L. Peterson and an afterword by Deborah E. McDowell.

 

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REGULATIONS OF ROBBERS
LEGAL FICTIONS OF SLAVERY AND RESISTANCE
CHRISTINA ACCOMANDO
The Ohio State University Press, 2001

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The Repeating Body
Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary
Kimberly Juanita Brown
Duke University Press, 2015
Haunted by representations of black women that resist the reality of the body's vulnerability, Kimberly Juanita Brown traces slavery's afterlife in black women's literary and visual cultural productions. Brown draws on black feminist theory, visual culture studies, literary criticism, and critical race theory to explore contemporary visual and literary representations of black women's bodies that embrace and foreground the body's vulnerability and slavery's inherent violence. She shows how writers such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, highlight the scarred and broken bodies of black women by repeating, passing down, and making visible the residues of slavery's existence and cruelty. Their work not only provides a corrective to those who refuse to acknowledge that vulnerability, but empowers black women to create their own subjectivities. In The Repeating Body, Brown returns black women to the center of discourses of slavery, thereby providing the means with which to more fully understand slavery's history and its penetrating reach into modern American life. 
 
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"Sweat"
Written by Zora Neale Hurston
Wall, Cheryl A
Rutgers University Press, 1997

Now frequently anthologized, Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" was first published in Firell, a legendary literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, whose sole issue appeared in November 1926. Among contributions by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, "Sweat" stood out both for its artistic accomplishment and its exploration of rural Southern black life. In "Sweat" Hurston claimed the voice that animates her mature fiction, notably the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; the themes of marital conflict and the development of spiritual consciousness were introduced as well. "Sweat" exemplifies Hurston's lifelong concern with women's relation to language and the literary possibilities of black vernacular.

This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of "Sweat," and a second story, "The Gilded Six-Bits." Published in 1932, this second story was written after Hurston had spent years conducting fieldwork in the Southern United States. The volume also includes Hurston's groundbreaking 1934 essay, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," and excerpts from her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. An article by folklorist Roger Abrahams provides additional cultural contexts for the story, as do selected blues and spirituals. Critical commentary comes from Alice Walker, who led the recovery of Hurston's work in the 1970s, Robert Hemenway, Henry Louis Gates, Gayl Jones, John Lowe, Kathryn Seidel, and Mary Helen Washington.

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Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination
Kathleen Marks
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination investigates Toni Morrison’s Beloved in light of ancient Greek influences, arguing that the African American experience depicted in the novel can be set in a broader context than is usually allowed. Kathleen Marks gives a history of the apotropaic from ancient to modern times, and shows the ways that Beloved’sprotagonist, Sethe, and her community engage the apotropaic as a mode of dealing with their communal suffering.

Apotropaic, from the Greek, meaning “to turn away from,” refers to rituals that were performed in ancient times to ward off evil deities. Modern scholars use the term to denote an action that, in attempting to prevent an evil, causes that very evil. Freud employed the apotropaic to explain his thought concerning Medusa and the castration complex, and Derrida found the apotropaic’s logic of self-sabotage consonant with his own thought.

Marks draws on this critical history and argues that Morrison’s heroine’s effort to keep the past at bay is apotropaic: a series of gestures aimed at resisting a danger, a threat, an imperative. These gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they seek to avoid—one does what one finds horrible so as to mitigate its horror. In Beloved, Sethe’s killing of her baby reveals this dynamic: she kills the baby in order to save it. As do all great heroes, Sethe transgresses boundaries, and such transgressions bring with them terrific dangers: for example, the figure Beloved. Yet Sethe’s action has ritualistic undertones that link it to the type of primal crimes that can bring relief to a petrified community. It is through these apotropaic gestures that the heroine and the community resist what Morrison calls “cultural amnesia” and engage in a shared past, finally inaugurating a new order of love.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination is eclectic in its approach—calling upon Greek religion, Greek mythology and underworld images, and psychology. Marks looks at the losses and benefits of the kind of self-damage/self-agency the apotropaic affords. Such an approach helps to frame the questions of the role of suffering in human life, the relation between humans and the underworld, and the uses of memory and history.
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The 'Tragic Mulatta' Revisited
Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction
Eve Allegra Raimon
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Since its inception, the United States has been intensely preoccupied with interracialism. The concept is embedded everywhere in our social and political fabric, including our sense of national identity. And yet, in both its quantitative and symbolic forms, interracialism remains an extremely elusive phenomenon, causing policy makers and census boards to wrangle over how to delineate it and, on an emblematic level, stirring intense emotions from fear to fascination.

In The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, Eve Allegra Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic vehicle for explorations of race and nation—both of which were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided with disputes over frontier expansion, which were never merely about land acquisition but also literally about the “complexion” of that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies, the “amalgamated” mulatta, the author argues, can be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary motifs of “hybrid” and “mestizo” identities.

Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject position of the “tragic mulatta,” Raimonreconsiders texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period.

                                                                                        

 

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The Unruly Voice
Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Edited by John Cullen Gruesser
University of Illinois Press, 1996

The work and times of the Black writer, editor, and intellectual

John Cullen Gruesser edits essays that explore the literary and journalistic career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. A Black woman writer at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins worked as the unacknowledged editor-in-chief of the Colored American Magazine but also wrote short fiction, novels, nonfiction articles, and a play believed to be the first by a Black woman. Versatile and politically committed, she was fired when her strong editorial stands and non-conciliatory politics offended the new owner of Colored American Magazine.

A rare examination of an overlooked figure in Black letters, The Unruly Voice explores Hopkins’s writing and her significance for contemporary readers.

Contributors: Elizabeth Ammons; Kristina Brooks; Lois Lamphere Brown; C. K. Doreski; John Cullen Gruesser; Jennie A. Kassanoff; Kate McCullough; Nelly Y. McKay; and Cynthia D. Schrager

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Wild Women in the Whirlwind
Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance
Edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin
Rutgers University Press, 1989
"Pays an impressive tribute to the new renaissance in African-American literature."
--New York Times Book Review

"The cultural and literary achievements of black American women are examined and celebrated in some 20 enjoyable, erudite essays by prominent scholars, critics, and activists."
--Publishers Weekly

This book is the first comprehensive collection of critical and theoretical essays to explore the literary and multi-cultural traditions of Black American women in many genres over a broad span of time. The essays explore cultural and literary experience in a wide context and offer a variety of critical theoretical constructs in which to view that experience. The editors have written excellent introductions providing both historical and comparative discussions of the contemporary literary renaissance. The book also includes a valuable bibliography of selected English-language works by Black women in the Americas from the 1970s to the present.
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Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits
The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women's Fiction
Maha Marouan
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women’s spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé.
 
Author Maha Marouan argues that while these authors’ works burst with powerful female figures—witches, goddesses, healers, priestesses, angry spirits—they also remain honest in reminding readers of the silences surrounding African diaspora women’s realities and experiences of violence, often as a result of gendered religious discourses. To make sense of Africana women’s experiences of the diaspora, this book operates from a transnational perspective that moves across national and linguistic boundaries as it connects the Anglophone, the Francophone, and the Creole worlds of the African Americas. In doing so, Marouan identifies crucial shared thematic concerns regarding the authors’ engagement with religious frameworks—some Judeo-Christian, some not—heretofore unexamined in such a careful, comparative fashion.
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Workings of the Spirit
The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing
Houston A. Baker Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, Workings of the Spirit weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history.

"Brilliant, and tenderly riveted to gratitude as an indispensable facet of analysis, Houston Baker arrives, yet again, bearing the loveliest flowers of his devotion and delight: thank God he's here!"—June Jordan
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