Representation of the ‘Two-Headed Doctor’ In African American Fiction: Tricksterism, Duality and Comparative Worldviews in Charles Chesnutt’sThe Conjure Woman

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Shirley Hanshaw
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Conjure Woman

“An Inside Thing to Live by”: Refusal, Conjure, and Black Feminist Imaginaries among Granny Midwives

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Lindsey Stewart
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Conjure Woman ◽  
Birthing Practices ◽  
American Thought

Abstract “Granny midwives” often based their authority to practice midwifery on the spiritual traditions of rootwork or conjure passed down by the foremothers who trained them. However, granny midwives were compelled to give up their conjure-infused methods of birthing if they wanted to become licensed (that is, to get a “permit”) or be authorized by the state to continue their practice of midwifery. In response, some granny midwives refused to recognize the authority of the state in the birthing realm, willfully retaining rootwork in their birthing practices. In this article, I contrast the response of granny midwives, a politics of refusal, with another major tradition in African American thought, a politics of recognition, such as gaining citizenship and rights, permits, and licenses from the state. Due to the political stakes of the granny midwife's conflict with the state, I argue that black feminists often endow the figure of the granny midwife (or more broadly, the conjure woman) with the political significance of refusal in our emancipatory imaginaries. To demonstrate this, I will analyze the interventions in black liberation politics that two black feminist writers make through their invocation of granny midwives: Zora Neale Hurston's essay, “High John de Conquer,” and Toni Morrison's novel, Paradise.

scholarly journals Semantic Set of N-Word Choices in Afro-American Fiction: A Corpus Analysis of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Rizwan Aftab ◽  
Asim Aqeel ◽  
Saba Zaidi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Word Choice ◽  
Lexical Choice ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Basic Concepts

This study explores the linguistic selection focusing on the use of N-word choice by African-American fiction writers. This study explains the basic concepts of language and language use, language as a text and discourse, and also the function it plays within the context. With Halliday and Hassan's semantic set of choices, this study argues that Zora Neale Hurston does not seem aware of consciously using N-words in her novel, but her use of Nword linguistic choice to communicate the theme of race is in line with her true reflection of the society and culture she is born and bred in. Hurston might have used N-word deliberately both to appropriate lexical choice with that of characters' roles as many of the Harlem Renaissance writers did and to establish a kind of community building and collective cultural solidarity, the major determinants of Hurston's use of the N-word in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Geomemory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Us South ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Us

Abstract This essay argues that contemporary African American novels turn to the gothic in order to dramatize the uncanny infrastructural and spatial afterlives of the plantation through a literary strategy it identifies as geomemory: a genre friction between mimetic and gothic modes in which postplantation spaces in the US South are imbued with temporal slippages such that past and present meet through the built environment. Tracing the plantation’s environmental and infrastructural presence in the Gulf Coast and throughout the US South, this essay argues that the plantation’s presence is fundamentally gothic. Geomemory, a trope evident across the emerging canon of contemporary African American fiction, allows writers to address the representational challenge of infrastructural and spatial violence via a defamiliarizing chronotope in which past, present, and future come into uneasy contact. Further, geomemory’s particular enmeshment with spatial design and infrastructure means that it moves from identifying the modern afterlife of the plantation to situating the present in the long context of plantation modernity.

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