Author : Sherley Anne Williams
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1986
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX
Dessa Rose
Sherley Anne Williams
Dessa Rose
Dessa Rose Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Dessa Rose book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Dessa Rose
Sherley A. Williams
Author : Sherley A. Williams
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2009-08-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780061965876
Dessa Rose by Sherley A. Williams Pdf
Sherley A. Williams’ highly acclaimed historical novel details two women’s fierce strength of will and an unlikely bond despite racial barriers in the pre-civil war south “Having this treasure of a book available again for new and more readers is not only necessary, it is imperative.”—Toni Morrison In 1829, in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In Dessa Rose, Sherley A. Williams asks the question: “What if these two women met?” From there the story unfolds: two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance; a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom; trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the two women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. United by fate but divided by prejudice, these two women are locked in a thrilling battle for freedom, sisterhood, friendship, and love.
The Freedom to Remember
Angelyn Mitchell
Author : Angelyn Mitchell
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 0813530695
The Freedom to Remember by Angelyn Mitchell Pdf
The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the "safe" vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.
History and Memory in African-American Culture
Genevieve Fabre Professor of American Literature University of Paris,Robert O'Meally Professor of English and African-American Studies Columbia University
Author : Genevieve Fabre Professor of American Literature University of Paris,Robert O'Meally Professor of English and African-American Studies Columbia University
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1994-10-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780195359244
History and Memory in African-American Culture by Genevieve Fabre Professor of American Literature University of Paris,Robert O'Meally Professor of English and African-American Studies Columbia University Pdf
As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Veve Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Genevieve Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
William L. Andrews,Frances Smith Foster,Trudier Harris
Author : William L. Andrews,Frances Smith Foster,Trudier Harris
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2001-02-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198031758
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature by William L. Andrews,Frances Smith Foster,Trudier Harris Pdf
A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson. It contains entries on major works (including synopses of novels), such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It also incorporates information on literary characters such as Bigger Thomas, Coffin Ed Johnson, Kunta Kinte, Sula Peace, as well as on character types such as Aunt Jemima, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Stackolee, and the trickster. Icons of black culture are addressed, including vivid details about the lives of Muhammad Ali, John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. Here, too, are general articles on poetry, fiction, and drama; on autobiography, slave narratives, Sunday School literature, and oratory; as well as on a wide spectrum of related topics. Compact yet thorough, this handy volume gathers works from a vast array of sources--from the black periodical press to women's clubs--making it one of the most substantial guides available on the growing, exciting world of African American literature.
History and Memory in African-American Culture
Genevieve Fabre,Robert O'Meally
Author : Genevieve Fabre,Robert O'Meally
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1994-12-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198024552
History and Memory in African-American Culture by Genevieve Fabre,Robert O'Meally Pdf
As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances. Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--from a variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory. The renowned group of contributors, including Hazel Carby, Werner Sollors, Vèvè Clark, Catherine Clinton, and Nellie McKay, among others, consists of participants of the five-year series of conferences at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University, from which this collection originated. Conducted under the leadership of Geneviève Fabre, Melvin Dixon, and the late Nathan Huggins, the conferences--and as a result, this book--represent something of a cultural moment themselves, and scholars and students of American and African-American literature and history will be richer as a result.
Neo-slave Narratives
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Author : Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1999-11-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198029007
Neo-slave Narratives by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Pdf
NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.
Liberating Narratives
Stefanie Sievers
Author : Stefanie Sievers
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 3825839192
Liberating Narratives by Stefanie Sievers Pdf
Three contemporary novels of slavery - Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) - are the central focus of Liberating Narratives. In significantly different ways that reflect their individual and socio-political contexts of origin, these three novels can all be read as critiques of historical representation and as alternative spaces for remembrance - 'sites of memory' - that attempt to shift the conceptual ground on which our knowledge of the past is based.
Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction
Keith Byerman
Author : Keith Byerman
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2006-05-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 080787678X
Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction by Keith Byerman Pdf
With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance
Shannon Sullivan,Nancy Tuana
Author : Shannon Sullivan,Nancy Tuana
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780791480038
Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance by Shannon Sullivan,Nancy Tuana Pdf
Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors, explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices. Book jacket.
Dessa Rose
Stephen Flaherty,Lynn Ahrens
Author : Stephen Flaherty,Lynn Ahrens
Publisher : Alfred Music
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Music
ISBN : PSU:000058133248
Dessa Rose by Stephen Flaherty,Lynn Ahrens Pdf
Selections from this acclaimed musical written by Ahrens/Flaherty, the team that brought you Ragtime. Titles are: At the Glen * Capture the Girl * Fly Away * In the Bend of My Arm * Ink * Little Star * Old Banjar * The Scheme * Something of My Own * Twelve Children * We Are Descended * White Milk & Red Blood.
Race Mixing
Suzanne W. Jones
Author : Suzanne W. Jones
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2006-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0801883938
Race Mixing by Suzanne W. Jones Pdf
In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers—including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe—illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities—and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, "to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities."
Deep Talk
Debra Walker King
Author : Debra Walker King
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813918529
Deep Talk by Debra Walker King Pdf
King (English, U. of Florida) draws on the work of Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. to explore the interpretive guidelines necessary to read what she calls the "metatext" of names, where these chosen words comment on and revise the action in a novel by giving voice to unspoken themes and events. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Transforming Scriptures
Katherine Clay Bassard
Author : Katherine Clay Bassard
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2010-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820336138
Transforming Scriptures by Katherine Clay Bassard Pdf
Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the "great code" of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective "literary witness" to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. Black women's historic encounters with the Bible were, indeed, transformational; in the process of "turning cursing into blessing" these women were both shaped and reshaped by the scriptures they appropriated for their own self-representation. Two important biblical figures emerge as key tropes around which women fashioned a counternarrative to the dominant culture's "curse" on black female identity: the "talking mule" from Numbers 22 and the "black but comely" Shulamite of Song of Songs, the Queen of Sheba. Transforming Scriptures analyzes these tropes within a range of contexts, from biblical justifications of slavery and the second-class status of women to hermeneutical and post-structural critiques of the Bible. African American women's appropriations of scripture occur within a continuum of African American Bible-reading practices and religious or ideological commitments, argues Bassard. There is thus no single "black women's hermeneutic"; rather, theories of African American women and the Bible must account for historical and social change and difference.
Speaking Power
DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor
Author : DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780791482315
Speaking Power by DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor Pdf
In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.