Spiritual Interrogations
Spiritual Interrogations

Author: Katherine Clay Bassard

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-01-18

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1400822599

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The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people. Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with African Methodism. Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spirituals matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life.

In the Life and in the Spirit
In the Life and in the Spirit

Author: Marlon Rachquel Moore

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1438454090

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Taking up the perceived tensions between the LGBTQ community and religious African Americans, Marlon Rachquel Moore examines how strategies of antihomophobic resistance dovetail into broader literary and cultural concerns. In the Life and in the Spirit shows how creative writers integrate expressions of faith or the supernatural with sensuality, desire, and pleasure in a way that highlights a spectrum of black sexualities and gender expressions. Through these fusions, African American writers enact queer spiritualities that situate the well-known work of James Baldwin into a broader community of artists, including Bruce Nugent, Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Jewelle Gomez, Becky Birtha, an d Octavia Butler. In these texts from 1963 to 1999, Moore identifies a pervasive, affirming stance toward LGBTQ people and culture in African American literary production.

All Those Strangers
All Those Strangers

Author: Douglas Field

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0199384150

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Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwin's personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin's geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themes-the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism-to bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.

A Mysterious Life and Calling
A Mysterious Life and Calling

Author: Charlotte S. Riley

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0299306747

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A critical edition of a newly discovered autobiography, this is a rare glimpse into the life of a woman who was an educated urban slave in Charleston, South Carolina; served after the American Civil War as a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and contributed as a preacher, teacher, and postmistress to civic development in post-Reconstruction and early twentieth-century South Carolina.

Activism in the Name of God
Activism in the Name of God

Author: Jami L. Carlacio

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-08-16

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1496845692

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Contributions by Janet Allured, Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Jami L. Carlacio, Cheryl J. Fish, Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Neely McLaughlin, Darcy Metcalfe, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, P. Jane Splawn, Laura L. Sullivan, and Hettie V. Williams Activism in the Name of God: Religion and Black Feminist Public Intellectuals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present recognizes and celebrates twelve Black feminists who have made an indelible mark not just on Black women’s intellectual history but on American intellectual history in general. The volume includes essays on Jarena Lee, Theressa Hoover, Pauli Murray, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to name a few. These women’s commitment to the social, political, and economic well-being of oppressed people in the United States shaped their work in the public sphere, which took the form of preaching, writing, singing, marching, presiding over religious institutions, teaching, assuming leadership roles in the civil rights movement, and creating politically subversive print and digital art. This anthology offers readers exemplars with whose minds and spirits we can engage, from whose ideas we can learn, and upon whose social justice work we can build. The volume joins a burgeoning chorus of texts that calls attention to the creativity of Black women who galvanized their readers, listeners, and fellow activists to seek justice for the oppressed. Pushing back on centuries of institutionalized injustices that have relegated Black women to the sidelines, the work of these Black feminist public intellectuals reflects both Christian gospel ethics and non-Christian religious traditions that celebrate the wholeness of Black people.

Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora
Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora

Author: Mae Henderson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0195116593

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Tropes ranging from Houston Baker's "bluesman," to Henry Louis Gates' "signifyin'" to Geneva Smitherman's "talkin' and testifyin'" to bell hooks' "talking back" to Cheryl Wall's "worrying the line" all affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary tradition. The collection of essays in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora contributes to this tradition by theorizing the preeminence of voice and narration (and the consequences of their absence) in the literary and cultural performances of black women. Looking to work by such prominent black female authors as Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, among many others, Mae G. Henderson provides a deeply felt reflection on race and gender and their effects within the discourse of speaker and listener.

James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain

Author: Carol E. Henderson

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9780820481586

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The publication of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain ushered in a new age of the urban telling of a tale twice told yet rarely expressed in such vivid portraits. Go Tell It unveils the struggle of man with his God and that of man with himself. Baldwin's intense scrutiny of the spiritual and communal customs that serve as moral centers of the black community directs attention to the striking incongruities of religious fundamentalism and oppression. This book examines these multiple impulses, challenging the widely held convention that politics and religion do not mix.

African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800: Volume 1
African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800: Volume 1

Author: Rhondda Robinson Thomas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 1108858767

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This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.

Hartford's Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity
Hartford's Ann Plato and the Native Borders of Identity

Author: Ron Welburn

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2015-04-21

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 143845578X

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Who was Ann Plato? Apart from circumstantial evidence, there's little information about the author of Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, published in 1841. Plato lived in a milieu of colored Hartford, Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century. Although long believed to have been African American herself, she may also, Ron Welburn argues, have been American Indian, like the father in her poem "The Natives of America." Combining literary criticism, ethnohistory, and social history, Welburn uses Plato as an example of how Indians in the Long Island Sound region adapted and prevailed despite the contemporary rhetoric of Indian disappearance. This study seeks to raise Plato's profile as an author as well as to highlight the dynamics of Indian resistance and isolation that have contributed to her enigmatic status as a literary figure.

Race
Race

Author: J. Kameron Carter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-09-02

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0199882371

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In Race: A Theological Account, J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present. Carter's claim is that Christian theology, and the signal transformation it (along with Christianity) underwent, is at the heart of these legacies. In that transformation, Christian anti-Judaism biologized itself so as to racialize itself. As a result, and with the legitimation of Christian theology, Christianity became the cultural property of the West, the religious ground of white supremacy and global hegemony. In short, Christianity became white. The racial imagination is thus a particular kind of theological problem. Not content only to describe this problem, Carter constructs a way forward for Christian theology. Through engagement with figures as disparate in outlook and as varied across the historical landscape as Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, Michel Foucault, Cornel West, Albert Raboteau, Charles Long, James Cone, Irenaeus of Lyons, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, Carter reorients the whole of Christian theology, bringing it into the twenty-first century. Neither a simple reiteration of Black Theology nor another expression of the new theological orthodoxies, this groundbreaking book will be a major contribution to contemporary Christian theology, with ramifications in other areas of the humanities.