Download Free Biomythography Bayou Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Biomythography Bayou and write the review.

When your stories flow from the brackish waters of the Gulf South, where the land and water merge, your narratives cannot be contained or constrained by the Eurocentric conventions of autobiography. When your story is rooted in the histories of your West African, Creek, and Creole ancestors, as well as your Black, feminist, and queer communities, you must create a biomythography that transcends linear time and extends beyond the pages of a book. Biomythography Bayou is more than just a book of memoir; it is a ritual for conjuring queer embodied knowledges and decolonial perspectives. Blending a rich gumbo of genres—from ingredients such as praise songs, folk tales, recipes, incantations, and invocations—it also includes a multimedia component, with “bayou tableau” images and audio recording links. Inspired by such writers as Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler, Mel Michelle Lewis draws from the well of her ancestors in order to chart a course toward healing Afrofutures. Showcasing the nature, folklore, dialect, foodways, music, and art of the Gulf’s coastal communities, Lewis finds poetic ways to celebrate their power and wisdom.
Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification. Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition.
Although breakups are a constant source of fascination, little attention has been given to women who are cut loose in their later years. This book is about (mostly) long-term relationships that have come apart. Each woman involved tells her own story through journal entries, essays, poetry, or stories.
After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families. Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state. Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.
IBPA Benjamin Franklin AwardTM gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
Carolina Maria de Jesus' book, Quarto de Despejo (The Trash Room), depicted the harsh life of the slums, but it also spoke of the author's pride in her blackness, her high moral standards, and her patriotism. More than a million copies of her diary are believed to have been sold worldwide. Yet many Brazilians refused to believe that someone like de Jesus could have written such a diary, with its complicated words (some of them misused) and often lyrical phrasing as she discussed world events. Doubters prefer to believe the book was either written by Audáulio Dantas, the enterprising newspaper reporter who discovered her, or that Dantas rewrote it so substantially that her book is a fraud. With the cooperation of de Jesus' daughter, recent research shows that although Dantas deleted considerable portions of the diary (as well as a second one), every word was de Jesus'. But Dantas did "create" a different Carolina from the woman who coped with her harsh life by putting things down on paper. This book sets the record straight by providing detailed translations of de Jesus' unedited diaries and explains why Brazilian elites were motivated to obscure her true personality and present her as something she was not. It is not only about the writer but about Brazil as recorded by her sarcastic pen. The diary entries in this book span from 1958 to 1966, five years beyond text previously known to exist. They show de Jesus as she was, preserving her Joycean stream-of-consciousness language and her pithy characterizations.