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"Provocative . . . articulates the importance of embodied, erotic spirituality to black female subjectivity and empowerment."--Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "Sets out to reclaim the right of black women to their sexual and erotic expression untainted by the stereotypes and disparagements that have historically confined them."--African American Review "Captures one of the most challenging concerns of scholars who engage black women's literature, culture, and theory: the ongoing quest to locate a form of black female sexual agency that neither withers in the chilly lake of sexual repression nor explodes in the heat of hypersexual stereotypes."--MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States "Successfully undertakes an analysis of how black women writers have used overlapping narrative depictions of sexuality and spirituality to recast the denigrated black female body and rewrite an empowered and fully actualized black female subject."--Candice M. Jenkins, author of Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy "Weir-Soley speaks with an authority that comes from real knowledge of, investment in, and attention to the details of the African cosmologies and textual complexities she unearths."--Carine Mardorossian, SUNY-Buffalo "The most original and significant contributions are the often brilliant readings of Morrison, Adisa, and Danticat. The work is riveting, both methodologically and critically."--Leslie Sanders, York University Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the body and religion more than a function of the mind, as exemplified in the works and characters of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat. Donna Weir-Soley builds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What she adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity, beginning with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings. Writing in a clear, lucid, and straightforward style, Weir-Soley supports her thesis with close readings of various texts, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison's Beloved. She reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Voudoun, Santeria, Condomble, Kumina, and Hoodoo. Her arguments are particularly persuasive in proposing an alternative model for black female subjectivity.
The author builds on previous scholars' work identifying the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What she adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity.
Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.
Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.
In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.
Scenes of Intimacy analyzes the representation of acts and relationships of intimacy in contemporary literature, the effect this has upon readers, and the ways these representations resonate with, complement, and challenge the concerns of contemporary theory. Opening with an in-depth interview with literary critic, Derridean, and novelist Professor Nicholas Royle, the volume contains eleven further essays that move from intimate scenes of familial and pedagogic legacy, on to representations of love, of sex, and finally to scenes of death and dying. The essays are textually attentive to how literary techniques create intimacy, and draw upon new and notable theoretical positions and critics from queer theory, affect studies, psychoanalysis, poststructualism and deconstruction to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions about intimacy and its representation. Across the genres of poetry, autobiography, journals, love letters, short stories and novels, Scenes of Intimacy shows that contemporary literature poses new possibilities and questions about our intimate relationalities, their failures and their futures.
Drawing on interviews conducted with Black couples in the United States, this book explores relational resilience and identifies unique adaptation strategies that enable couples to overcome the multigenerational effects of violence and sexual mass trauma from slavery and activates compassionate love in flourishing relationships. By applying Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology and family systems theory, the book captures the spiritual, emotional, and sexual dimensions in Black couple systems that gives meaning to their resilient relationships in the context of contemporary America. Within the framework of compassionate love, the book highlights the need for researchers and clinicians to include the broader cultural contexts in their sexual trauma-informed studies and interventions. Using genetic studies and empirical evidence, the volume contributes significantly to discussion around Black relationships and historical trauma and to the broader challenges within race relations in the United States. This book will benefit researchers, academicians, and clinicians with an interest in sexual trauma, marriage, and family therapy, and couples counseling more broadly. Readers will also find this book useful when designing research in Black studies, intergenerational issues, or sexual intimacy.
Throughout Haitian history—from 17th century colonial Saint-Domingue to 21st century postcolonial Haiti—arguably, the Afro-Haitian religion of Vodou has been represented as an “unsettling faith” and a “cultural paradox,” as expressed in various forms and modes of Haitian thought and life including literature, history, law, politics, painting, music, and art. Competing voices and conflicting ideas of Vodou have emerged from each of these cultural symbols and intellectual expressions. The Vodouist discourse has not only pervaded every aspect of the Haitian life and experience, it has defined the Haitian cosmology and worldview. Further, the Vodou faith has had a momentous impact on the evolution of Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination; comparatively, Vodou has shaped Haitian social ethics, sexual and gender identity, and theological discourse such as in the intellectual works and poetic imagination of Jean Price-Mars, Dantes Bellegarde, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, etc. Similarly, Vodou has shaped the discourse on the intersections of memory, trauma, history, collective redemption, and Haitian diasporic identity in Haitian women’s writings such as in the fiction of Edwidge Danticat, Myriam Chancy, etc. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.
This volume studies processes of creating voices of the past to analyze and to juxtapose, discussing the nature of the educational community viewed through feminist theory to reveal hidden ideas surrounding stereotypes, gender status, and power in the postcolonial era. The contributions brought together here explore the various facets of language to focus on metaphorical grammatical constructions, unique and specific with form and function. They interpret various works to capture the essence of style, as well as rhetorical function of basic structure of grammar, diction and syntax, in a literary work as message and meaning. Furthermore, the book also discusses useful pedagogical and theoretical processes used by the literary scholar concerning the power of writing for cultural change. As such, the book will appeal to those who wish to heal through writing. The proceeds of the book support the authors’ local soup kitchen and crisis centers for domestic abuse.
Outside the world of children’s literature studies, children’s books by authors of well-known texts “for adults” are often forgotten or marginalized. Although many adults today read contemporary children’s and young adult fiction for pleasure, others continue to see such texts as unsuitable for older audiences, and they are unlikely to cross-read children’s books that were themselves cross-written by authors like Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Joy Harjo, or Amy Tan. Meanwhile, these literary voices have produced politically vital works of children’s literature whose complex themes persist across boundaries of expected audience. These works form part of a larger body of activist writing “for children” that has long challenged preconceived notions about the seriousness of such books and ideas about who, in fact, should read them. They Also Write for Kids: Cross-Writing, Activism, and Children’s Literature seeks to draw these cross-writing projects together and bring them to the attention of readers. In doing so, this book invites readers to place children’s literature in conversation with works more typically understood as being for adult audiences, read multiethnic US literature alongside texts by global writers, consider children’s poetry and nonfiction as well as fiction, and read diachronically as well as cross-culturally. These ways of reading offer points of entry into a world of books that refuse to exclude young audiences in scrutinizing topics that range from US settler colonialism and linguistic prejudice to intersectional forms of gender inequality. The authors included here also employ an intricate array of writing strategies that challenge lingering stereotypes of children’s literature as artistically as well as intellectually simplistic. They subversively repurpose tropes and conventions from canonical children’s books; embrace an epistemology of children’s literature that emphasizes ambiguity and complexity; invite readers to participate in redefining concepts such as “civilization” and cultural belonging; engage in intricate acts of cross-cultural representation; and re-envision their own earlier works in new forms tailored explicitly to younger audiences. Too often disregarded by skeptical adults, these texts offer rich rewards to readers of all ages, and here they are brought to the fore.