African Spirituality In Black Women S Fiction

Author : Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2012-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739179376

Get Book

African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction by Elizabeth J. West Pdf

African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women's writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley's veiled remembrances to Hurston's explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston's icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women's writings.

Author : Maha Marouan
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2020-07-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814256635

Get Book

Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits by Maha Marouan Pdf

Author : K. Zauditu-Selassie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Africa
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131678455

Get Book

African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison by K. Zauditu-Selassie Pdf

"Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author. No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison's work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie's many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison's work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing."--Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. K. Zauditu-Selassie delves deeply into African spiritual traditions, clearly explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a comprehensive, tour-de-force critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive. Zauditu-Selassie explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. Zauditu-Selassie is uniquely positioned to write this book, as she is not only a literary critic but also a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and nonfiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Author : Akasha Gloria Hull
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2001-04-01
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781594775215

Get Book

Soul Talk by Akasha Gloria Hull Pdf

• A celebration of the journey of African-American women toward a new spirituality grounded in social awareness, black American tradition, metaphysics, and heightened creativity. • Features illuminating insights from Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Dolores Kendrick, Sonia Sanchez, Michele Gibbs, Geraldine McIntosh, Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Namonyah Soipan. • By a widely published scholar, poet, and activist who has been interviewed by the press, television, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered From the last part of the twentieth century through today, African-American women have experienced a revival of spirituality and creative force, fashioning a uniquely African-American way to connect with the divine. In Soul Talk, Akasha Gloria Hull examines this multifaceted spirituality that has both fostered personal healing and functioned as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice. Through fascinating and heartfelt conversations with some of today's most creative and powerful women--women whose spirituality encompasses, among others, traditional Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American teachings, meditation, the I Ching, and African-derived ancestral reverence--the author explores how this new spiritual consciousness is manifested, how it affects the women who practice it, and how its effects can be carried to others. Using a unique and readable blend of interviews, storytelling, literary critique, and practical suggestions of ways readers can incorporate similar renewal into their daily lives, Soul Talk shows how personal and social change are possible through reconnection with the spirit.

Author : Vicent Cucarella Ramón
Publisher : Universitat de València
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2018-10-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9788491343189

Get Book

Sacred Femininity and the Politics of Affect in African American Women's Fiction by Vicent Cucarella Ramón Pdf

This book presents the way in which African American women writers (Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison) have followed the spiritual endeavor of black Christianity as created by early nineteenth-century spiritual narratives to construct a sacred reading of the black female self. The sacred femininity that puts the ethics and aesthetics of African American women at the center of a certain mode of (African) Americanness relies on a view of spirituality that joins women ontologically and validates affective modes of representation as an innovative means to obtain social and personal empowerment.

Author : Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739181423

Get Book

Literary Expressions of African Spirituality by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West Pdf

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

Author : Carol Henderson
Publisher : MDPI
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783036500829

Get Book

“My Soul Is A Witness” by Carol Henderson Pdf

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.

Author : Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2013-04-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739181430

Get Book

Literary Expressions of African Spirituality by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West Pdf

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

Author : Gloria T. Hull,Akasha Gloria Hull
Publisher : Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2001-04
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 089281943X

Get Book

Soul Talk by Gloria T. Hull,Akasha Gloria Hull Pdf

In the last few decades African-American women have experienced a revival of spirituality and creative force, fashioning a unique way to connect with the divine. In "Soul Talk", Akasha Gloria Hull examines this multifaceted spirituality that has both fostered personal healing and functioned as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice.

Author : Kameelah L. Martin
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781498523295

Get Book

Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics by Kameelah L. Martin Pdf

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

Author : Maha Marouan
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : African American women authors
ISBN : 0814270158

Get Book

Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits by Maha Marouan Pdf

Author : Yolanda Pierce
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 123 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813072173

Get Book

Hell Without Fires by Yolanda Pierce Pdf

Hell Without Fires examines the spiritual and earthly results of conversion to Christianity for African-American antebellum writers. Using autobiographical narratives, the book shows how black writers transformed the earthly hell of slavery into a "New Jerusalem," a place they could call home. Yolanda Pierce insists that for African Americans, accounts of spiritual conversion revealed "personal transformations with far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual's relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community." The process of conversion could result in miraculous literacy, "callings" to preach, a renewed resistance to the slave condition, defiance of racist and sexist conventions, and communal uplift. These stories by five of the earliest antebellum spiritual writers--George White, John Jea, David Smith, Solomon Bayley, and Zilpha Elaw--create a new religious language that merges Christian scripture with distinct retellings of biblical stories, with enslaved people of African descent at their center. Showing the ways their language exploits the levels of meaning of words like master, slavery, sin, and flesh, Pierce argues that the narratives address the needs of those who attempted to transform a foreign god and religion into a personal and collective system of beliefs. The earthly "hell without fires"--one of the writer's characterizations of everyday life for those living in slavery--could become a place where an individual could be both black and Christian, and religion could offer bodily and psychological healing. Pierce presents a complex and subtle assessment of the language of conversion in the context of slavery. Her work will be important to those interested in the topics of slave religion and spiritual autobiography and to scholars of African American and early American literature and religion.

Author : R. Marie Griffith,Barbara Dianne Savage
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2006-09-22
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0801883695

Get Book

Women and Religion in the African Diaspora by R. Marie Griffith,Barbara Dianne Savage Pdf

This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays explores how diverse women of African descent have practiced religion as part of the work of their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives. By examining women from North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa, the contributors identify the patterns that emerge as women, religion, and diaspora intersect, mapping fresh approaches to this emergent field of inquiry. The volume focuses on issues of history, tradition, and the authenticity of African-derived spiritual practices in a variety of contexts, including those where memories of suffering remain fresh and powerful. The contributors discuss matters of power and leadership and of religious expressions outside of institutional settings. The essays study women of Christian denominations, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Islam, addressing their roles as spiritual leaders, artists and musicians, preachers, and participants in bible-study groups. This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2024-06-13
Category : Education
ISBN : 8491342699

Get Book

Sacred Femininity and the politics of affect in African American women's fiction by Anonim Pdf

Author : Carol Henderson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 3036500839

Get Book

“My Soul Is A Witness” by Carol Henderson Pdf

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.