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Exploring the relationship between culture and health, this text provides readings of the works of five women writers, tracing their common structure of a main character moving from a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions.
Case studies upon the use of concepts like feminization and masculinization in relation to christianity. Since the 1970s the feminization thesis has become a powerful trope in the rewriting of the social history of Christendom. However, this 'thesis' has triggered some vehement debates, given that men have continued to dominate the churches, and the churches themselves have reacted to the association of religion and femininity, often formulated by their critics, by explicitly focusing their appeal to men. In this book the authors critically reflect upon the use of concepts like feminization and masculinization in relation to Christianity.
The Grasp That Reaches beyond the Grave investigates the treatment of the ancestor figure in Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata and A Sunday in June, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Tananarive Due's The Between, and Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust in order to understand how they draw on African cosmology and the interrelationship of ancestors, elders, and children to promote healing within the African American community. Venetria K. Patton suggests that the experience of slavery with its concomitant view of black women as "natally dead" has impacted African American women writers' emphasis on elders and ancestors as they seek means to counteract notions of black women as somehow disconnected from the progeny of their wombs. This misperception is in part addressed via a rich kinship system, which includes the living and the dead. Patton notes an uncanny connection between depictions of elder, ancestor, and child figures in these texts and Kongo cosmology. These references suggest that these works are examples of Africanisms or African retentions, which continue to impact African American culture.
"A major contribution to literary and cultural studies—bold, illuminating, and persuasively argued."—Karla Holloway, Duke University
The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects. In this innovative, genre- and format-bending publication, Avery F...
The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published. Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems.
Kimberly Nichele Brown examines how African American women since the 1970s have found ways to move beyond the "double consciousness" of the colonized text to develop a healthy subjectivity that attempts to disassociate black subjectivity from its connection to white culture. Brown traces the emergence of this new consciousness from its roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement through important milestones such as the anthology The Black Woman and Essence magazine to the writings of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez.
This special collection assembles some of the most pre-eminent scholars in the field in African, African American, and American Studies to explore the ways writers reclaim the Black female body in African American literature using the theoretical, social, cultural, and religious frameworks of spirituality and religion. Central to these discussions is Black women’s agency within these realms—their uncanny ability to invent and reinvent themselves within individual and communal spaces that frame them as both outsider and insider, unworthy and worthy, deviant and sacred, excess and minimal. Scholars have sought to discuss these tensions, acknowledged and affirmed in prose, poetry, music, essays, speeches, written plays, or short stories. Forgiveness, healing, redemption, and reclamation provide entry into these vibrant explorations of self-discovery, passion, and self-creation that interrogate traditional views of what is spiritual and what is religious. Discussed writers include Toni Morrison, Phillis Wheatley, James Baldwin, Tina McElroy Ansa, Toni Cade Bambara, and Thomas Dorsey.
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Ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies. Book jacket.