Our Mothers Our Powers Our Texts

Author : Teresa N. Washington
Publisher : Oya's Tornado
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-12-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts by Teresa N. Washington Pdf

“Blazes a new trail in Africana literary criticism by providing an insight into the soul and spirit of Africana womanhood.” --Anthonia Kalu, The Ohio State University, author of Women, Literature, and Development in Africa This is the revised and expanded edition of Teresa N. Washington's groundbreaking book Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature. In Yoruba language and culture, Aje signifies both a phenomenal spiritual power and the human beings who exercise that power. Aje is the birthright of Africana women who are revered as the Gods of Society. While Africana men can have Aje, its owners and controllers are Africana women. Because it is an African female power, and due to its invisibility, ubiquity, and profundity, Aje is often maligned as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington reveals in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Aje is central to the Yoruba ethos, worldview, and cosmology. Not only is it essential to human creation and artistic creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Aje is vital to social harmony and balance. Washington analyzes forms, figures, and forces of Aje in the Yoruba world, in the Caribbean Islands, in Latin America, and in African America. Washington's research reveals that with the exile and enslavement of millions of Africans, Aje became a global force and an essential ally in organizing insurrections, soothing shattered souls, and reminding the dispossessed of their inherent divinity. From her in-depth exploration of Aje in Pan-African history and orature, Washington guides readers through rich analyses of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual manifestations of Aje that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts includes innovative readings of works by many Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This revised and expanded edition of Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts will appeal to scholars of Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, gender studies, and comparative literature. Devotees of Africana spiritual systems will find this book to be indispensable.

Author : Teresa N. Washington
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0253217571

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Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts by Teresa N. Washington Pdf

"Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated." —Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson University Àjé is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Àjé, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Àjé is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Àjé is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Àjé is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Àjé with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World. Washington seeks out Àjé's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Àjé in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.

Author : Teresa N. Washington
Publisher : Oya's Tornado
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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The Architects of Existence by Teresa N. Washington Pdf

Author : LaToya Jefferson-James
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-03-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793606716

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New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers by LaToya Jefferson-James Pdf

New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers spans the contemporary era into the AfroFuture. It begins with Ann Petry, who has been forcibly mashed into masculinized critical paradigms, and ends by introducing audiences to Black speculative and Science Fiction writers.

Author : Teresa N. Washington
Publisher : Oya's Tornado
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Manifestations of Masculine Magnificence by Teresa N. Washington Pdf

Manifestations of Masculine Magnificence: Divinity in Africana Life, Lyrics, and Literature is a remarkable study and the first of its kind. Teresa N. Washington eschews popular culture’s pimp myths and thug sagas and traces the Africana man’s power, creativity, and consciousness to his inherent divinity. Manifestations of Masculine Magnificence takes the reader to the source of power with an analysis of African Divinities and divine technologies. Washington explores the permanence and proliferation of African Gods from oppressive plantations to the empowering proclamations of such leaders as W. D. Fard, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, and Allah, the Father. Washington analyzes the summonses to and from the Gods that resonate in the music of such artists as Erykah Badu, The RZA, Sun Ra, X Clan, and Rakim. Using literary analysis as a prism to display the diversity of Africana divinity, Washington reveals the literature of such writers as August Wilson, Walter Mosley, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Ishmael Reed to be three-way mirrors that eternally reflect and project the Gods, their myriad powers, and their weighty responsibilities. Manifestations of Masculine Magnificence will prove indispensable to independent scholars as well as scholars of Comparative Literature, Hip Hop Studies, Gender Studies, Africana Studies, Literary Criticism, and Religious Studies.

Author : Teresa N. Washington
Publisher : Oya's Tornado
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2016-11-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780991073085

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The African World in Dialogue by Teresa N. Washington Pdf

The African World in Dialogue: An Appeal to Action! is a probing and politically timely collection of essays, interviews, speeches, poetry, short stories, and proposals. These rich works illuminate the struggles, dreams, triumphs, impediments, and diversity of the contemporary African world. The African World in Dialogue contains five sections: "Listen: The Ink Speaks"; "Restitutions, Resolutions, Revolutions"; "Africanity, Education, and Technology"; "Life Lines from the Front Lines"; and "Gender, Power, and Infinite Promise." Each section brims with provocative and compelling insights from elder-warriors, wordsmiths, journalists, and academics, many of whom are also activists. The volume's contributors include Tunde Adegbola, Muhammad Ibn Bashir, Jacqueline Bediako, Charlie Braxton, Alieu Bundu, Baba A. O. Buntu, Chinweizu, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Oyinlola Longe, Jumbe Kweku Lumumba, Morgan Miller, Asiri Odu, Chinwe Ezinna Oriji, Kevin Powell, Blair Marcus Proctor, Ishola Akindele Salami, Aseret Sin, Teresa N. Washington, and Ayoka Wiles. The book also features interviews with Hilary La Force, Mandingo, Kambale Musavili, and Prince Kuma N’dumbe. With selections designed to critique and in many cases upend conventional political thought, educational norms, fantasies of social progress, and gender myths, The African World in Dialogue challenges its audience. The book’s “Appeal to Action” is literal: Rather than offering eloquent elaborations of African world woes, The African World in Dialogue offers detailed plans and paths for emancipation and elevation that readers are urged to implement. Activists and scholars of African studies, African American studies, Pan-Africanism, criminal justice, Black revolutionary thought and action, gender studies, sociology, and political science will find this book to be both inspirational and indispensable.

Author : Solimar Otero,Toyin Falola
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781438447995

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Yemoja by Solimar Otero,Toyin Falola Pdf

Bridges theory, art, and practice to discuss emerging issues in transnational religious movements in Latina/o and African diasporas. This is the first collection of essays to analyze intersectional religious and cultural practices surrounding the deity Yemoja. In Afro-Atlantic traditions, Yemoja is associated with motherhood, women, the arts, and the family. This book reveals how Yemoja traditions are negotiating gender, sexuality, and cultural identities in bold ways that emphasize the shifting beliefs and cultural practices of contemporary times. Contributors come from a wide range of fields—religious studies, art history, literature, and anthropology—and focus on the central concern of how different religious communities explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality through religious practice and discourse. The volume adds the voices of religious practitioners and artists to those of scholars to engage in conversations about how Latino/a and African diaspora religions respond creatively to a history of colonization.

Author : Valerie Mason-John
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2021-07-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781623175634

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Afrikan Wisdom by Valerie Mason-John Pdf

A spiritual, political, and interdisciplinary anthology of wisdom stories from Black liberation leaders and teachers. Afrikan Wisdom represents an intersectional, cross-pollinated exploration of Black life--past, present, and future. Award-winning author and editor Valerie Mason-John (Vimalasara)'s collection of 34 essays--written by an eclectic and inspirational group of Black thought leaders and teachers--reflects on the unique and multilayered experience of being Black in the world today. This anthology instills in readers the knowledge, awareness, validation, and spiritual tools necessary to nurture both individual and collective liberation. It is both an inspiration and a motivation for Black readers, as well as anyone else interested in reading about emerging spiritual voices. Topics include: • African and Afro-Diasporan cultures, histories, spiritualities, art, music, and literature • Black radical traditions of liberation and consciousness • Anticolonialism and antislavery • Buddhist philosophy • Social and environmental justice • The prison industrial complex and mass incarceration • (Kemetic) yoga, healing, and mindfulness • Intersections with Indigenous cultures • Addiction and recovery • Transgenerational trauma

Author : Velma E. Love
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 159 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2015-06-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780271061450

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Divining the Self by Velma E. Love Pdf

Divining the Self weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of scripture and scripturalizing practices. Velma Love examines the Odu—the Yoruba sacred scriptures—along with the accompanying mythology, philosophy, and ritual technologies engaged by African Americans. Drawing from the personal narratives of African American Ifa practitioners along with additional ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oyotunji African Village, South Carolina, and New York City, Love’s work explores the ways in which an ancient worldview survives in modern times. Divining the Self also takes up the challenge of determining what it means for the scholar of religion to study scripture as both text and performance. This work provides an excellent case study of the sociocultural phenomenon of scripturalizing practices.

Author : Lorelle D. Semley
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2010-11-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253004888

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Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass by Lorelle D. Semley Pdf

Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.

Author : Donna R. Gabaccia,Mary Jo Maynes
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2013-02-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781118508220

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Gender History Across Epistemologies by Donna R. Gabaccia,Mary Jo Maynes Pdf

Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries - disciplinary, methodological, and national - to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central in gender history over the past two decades Contributions within this volume to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and approaches The volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of common grounds

Author : Susan de-Gaia
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 902 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2018-11-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9798216166979

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Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions [2 volumes] by Susan de-Gaia Pdf

This reference offers reliable knowledge about women's diverse faith practices throughout history and prehistory, and across cultures. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity, making enormous contributions to religion and spirituality. In the contemporary period, women have achieved greater equality, with more educational opportunities, female role models in public life, and opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Contemporaneously with this increased visibility, women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves and for their communities. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars, this reference chronicles the religious experiences of women across time and cultures. The book includes sections on major religions as well as on spirituality, African religions, prehistoric religions, and other broad topics. Each section begins with an introduction, followed by reference entries on specialized subjects along with excerpts from primary source documents. The entries provide numerous suggestions for further reading, and the book closes with a detailed bibliography.

Author : Paul Carter Harrison,Michael D. Harris,Pellom McDaniels III
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2022-04-28
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781000549300

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ASHÉ by Paul Carter Harrison,Michael D. Harris,Pellom McDaniels III Pdf

‘ASHÉ: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic Expressivity' is a collection of interdisciplinary essays contributed by international scholars and practitioners. Having distinguished themselves across such disciplines as Anthropology, Art, Music, Literature, Dance, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and conjoined to construct a defining approach to the study of Aesthetics throughout the African Diaspora with the Humanities at the core, this collection of essays will break new ground in the study of Black Aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners, and students interested in tracing African heritage identities throughout the African Diaspora through close examination of a variety of discourses directly connected to expressive elements of cultural production and religious rituals.

Author : Adetayo Alabi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000428865

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Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories by Adetayo Alabi Pdf

Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories discusses the oral life stories and poems that Africans, particularly the Yoruba people, have told about the self and community over hundreds of years. Disproving the Eurocentric argument that Africans didn’t produce stories about themselves, the author showcases a vibrant literary tradition of oral autobiographies in Africa and the diaspora. The oral auto/biographies studied in this book show that stories and poems about individuals and their communities have always existed in various African societies and they were used to record, teach, and document history, culture, tradition, identity, and resistance. Genres covered in the book include the panegyric, witches’ and wizards’ narratives, the epithalamium tradition, the hunter’s chant, and Udje of the Urhobo. Providing an important showcase for oral narrative traditions this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers in African and Africana studies, literature and auto/biographical studies.

Author : Christopher N. Okonkwo
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781572336155

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A Spirit of Dialogue by Christopher N. Okonkwo Pdf

A groundbreaking study, A Spirit of Dialogue examines through extensive, interdisciplinary research, theory, and close reading the intricate reconstructions, extensions, and resonances of the West African myth of spirit children, the "Born-to-Die," in contemporary African American neo-slave narratives. Arguing that the myth, called "Ogbañje" in Igbo language and "àbíkú" in Yoruba, has had over thirty years of uncharted presence in African American literature, Okonkwo advances a compelling case absent in extant scholarship. He traces Ogbañje/the Born-to-Die's appearance in African American texts to a convergence of factors. They include but are not limited to: the impact of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; the 1960s emergence of the contemporary neo-slave narrative; the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness/Black Power movement and the cultural agenda, gendered politics, and centripetal philosophy of the Black Arts movement's nationalist aesthetic; African American identity questions of the post-civil rights and the multicultural eras; and the thematic shifts, as well as the African diaspora orientation of African American fiction of the post-nationalist aesthetic period. A Spirit of Dialogue focuses on the sometimes neglected and understudied works of four canonical African American writers: Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Tananarive Due's The Between, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Okonkwo demonstrates persuasively how the mythic spirit child informs the content and form of these novels, offering Butler, Due, Wideman, and Morrison a non-occidental "code" by which to engage collectively with the various issues integral to the history experience of African-descended people. The paradigm functions, then, as the nexus of a life-affirmative dialogue among the six novels, as well as between them and other works of African religious and literary imagination, particularly Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road.