scholarly journals Paule Marshall and the search for the African diaspora

1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-88
Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

[First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. 164 pp. (Paper n.p.)Literary history has not been very kind to Paule Marshall. Even in the early 1980s when literature produced by African-American women was gaining prominence among general readers and drawing the attention of critics, Marshall was still considered to be an enigmatic literary figure, somehow important in the canon but not one of its trend setters. As Mary Helen Washington observed in an influential afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, although Marshall had been publishing novels and short stories since the early 1950s, and was indeed the key link between African-American writers of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, she was just being "discovered" in the 1980s. While there has always been a small group of scholars, most notably Kamau Brathwaite, who have called attention to the indispensable role Marshall has played in the shaping of the literary canon of the African Diaspora, and of her profound understanding of the issues that have affected the complex formation and survival of African-derived cultures in the New World, many critics have found it difficult to locate her within the American, African-American, and Caribbean traditions that are the sources of her imagination and the subject of her major works. Marshall has embraced all these cultures in more profound ways than her more famous contemporaries have, but she has not gotten the accolades that have gone to lesser writers like Alice Walker. It is indeed one of the greatest injustices of our time that Walker's limited understanding of the cultures and peoples of the African Diaspora has become the point of reference for North American scholars of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America while Marshall's scholastic engagement with questions of Diaspora has not drawn the same kind of interest.

THOSE SEGREGATED AND SACRED HOURS: New Perspectives on Religion, Race, and Gender in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-331
Author(s):  
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
University Of California ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Mark Chaves, Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 291 pages, ISBN 0-674-01284-4, Cloth, $29.95.Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 263 pages, ISBN 0-520-23394-8, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, 271 pages, ISBN 0-520-23795-1, Cloth, $50.00, Paper, $19.95.

Michelle Obama as a Political Symbol: Race, Gender, and Public Opinion toward the First Lady

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 431-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Badas ◽  
Katelyn E. Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
First Lady ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Michelle Obama ◽  
Political Symbol ◽  
And Gender

AbstractPopular commentary surrounding Michelle Obama focuses on the symbolic importance of her tenure as the nation's first African American first lady. Despite these assertions, relatively few studies have examined public opinion toward Michelle Obama and the extent to which race and gender influenced public evaluations of her. Even fewer studies have examined how the intersection of race and gender influenced political attitudes toward Michelle Obama and her ability to serve as a meaningful political symbol. Using public opinion polls from 2008 to 2017 and data from the Black Women in America survey, we examine public opinion toward Michelle Obama as a function of respondents’ race, gender, and the intersection between the two. We find that African Americans were generally more favorable toward Michelle Obama than white Americans, with minimal differences between men and women. Although white women were no more likely than white men to view Michelle Obama favorably, we find that they were more likely to have information on Michelle Obama's “Let's Move” initiative. Most importantly, we find that Michelle Obama served as a unique political symbol for African American women and that her presence in politics significantly increased black women's evaluation of their race-gender group.

scholarly journals Gender and racial trauma in Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Ramesh Prasad Adhikary
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Racial Trauma ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Voice

This paper analyses racial and gender trauma evoking the tormented state of the narrator, Maya in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Based on the cultural trauma, the researcher analyses the experiences of depressed African American women without identities. The narrator struggles to develop her dignified self and nonconformist outlook comes to block her after she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend Mr. Freeeman. The mysterious murder of her rapist creates the guilt, shame in her psychic as she thinks that she is responsible for his murder. The narrator suffering from the guilt and self-loathing results in her psychic turmoil. She stops speaking to people except her brother, Bailey. In the novel, Angelou tries to raise the voice of Black women to achieve dignified identity in the white racist and sexist America looking back on her childhood experiences. In this regard, this research aims to show reasons that cause the traumatic situation in the narrator due to several events that erupt in African American societies. Not only this, this research work explores issues related to the cause of racial and gender trauma and discusses how the narrator succeeds in working through trauma while in some cases the narrator just acts out it. Key Words: Race, Gender, Cultural trauma, Psychic turmoil, identity, self

scholarly journals Discrimination in “the City”: Race, Class, and Gender in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Golam Rabbani
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Women ◽  
Relational Space ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Toni Morrison, the African American Nobel laureate author, explores the realities where African American women face multiple discriminations in her novel Jazz (1992). This article, following the qualitative method on the bibliographic study, examines the discriminations entailing race, class, and gender and presents Harlem as a discriminatory space in the novel. Jazz narrates the struggles of African American women who settled in Harlem in the early twentieth-century. Haunted by the memories of slavery, the female African American characters in the novel find themselves subjugated in the society dominated by white Americans and also experience oppression within their black community. Harlem, denoted as “the City” in the novel, identifies itself as the relational space where black women experience the intersecting subjugation and alienation from their race, class, and gender positions.

The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the “Vital Link”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Old Left ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.

scholarly journals Sassy Sasha?: The intersectionality of (im)politeness and sociolinguistics

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Troutman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Black Females ◽  
Online Assessments ◽  
General Linguistic

Abstract This article focuses on intersections of race, gender, class, and (im)politeness within the African American speech community (AASC). Although general linguistic theorizing aims at universalizing (im)politeness, ultimately identifying common components within human (im)politeness systems worldwide, African American perspectives have not been interjected within that broader theorizing. Thus, I examine (im)politeness from the perspective of African Americans with a focus on females’ linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors. A plethora of work examines, challenges, and refutes stereotypical gender. I explore facets of the stereotypical, particularly as applied to Black females with the aim of broadening understandings of (im)politeness based on cultural variation. Specifically, I examine sassy as a social construct when applied to Black women in U.S. contexts, especially two Black women’s online assessments of sassy performativity by Sasha Obama, as a vehicle for allowing Black women’s voices and experiences to enter into theory-making. The analysis is interpretative and idiographic. The two African American women bloggers’ words and meanings suggest that (im)politeness within the AASC resides in sociolinguistics, not pragmatics. As a result of the analysis, I suggest that (im)politeness theorizing could pay attention to the social embodiedness of human polite and impolite behaviors. This, in part, constitutes the sociolinguistics of (im)politeness.

scholarly journals African American Women and Domestic Violence: Addressing their Voice of Silence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Kennedy ◽  
Chalice Rhodes (Former Jenkins)
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
American Women ◽  
Strong Black Women

Abstract Historically, during slavery, the international slave trade promoted normalization of violence against African American women. During slavery, African American women endured inhuman conditions because of the majority race views of them as being over-sexualized, physically strong, and immoral. This perception of the African American women as being highly sexual and more sexual than white women results in slave owner justifying their sexual violation and degrading of the African American women. The stereotypical representations of African American women as strong, controlling, dangerous, fearless, and invulnerable may interfere with the African American women receiving the needed services for domestic violence in the community. The Strong Black Women Archetype has been dated back to slavery describing their coping mechanism in dealing with oppression by developing a strong, less traditionally female role. The authors developed a model: The Multidimensional Perspectives of Factors Contributing to Domestic Violence of African American Women in the United States. This model depicts historically, the factors contributing to domestic violence of African American women in the United States. Also, this model addressed the African American women subscribing to the Strong Black Women Archetype to cope with domestic violence. Despite the increase in domestic violence in African American women, they focused more on the issue of racism instead of sexism in America. African American women have experienced the two obstacles of racism and sexism in America. However, African American women and men believe racism is more critical than sexism. Therefore, domestic violence in the African American population may remain silent because of cultural loyalty. However, the voice of silence of African American females is gradually changing with the upcoming generations.

scholarly journals THE SEQUEL: THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, AND SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN'S STRUGGLE TO VOTE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liette Gidlow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
The South ◽  
American Women ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Fifteenth Amendment

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

scholarly journals Increasing Physical Activity in Black Women: Results from a Randomized Trial Conducted in Faith-Based Settings

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melicia C. Whitt-Glover ◽  
Moses V. Goldmon ◽  
Ziya Gizlice ◽  
Marie Sillice ◽  
Lyndsey Hornbuckle ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Control Group ◽  
High Risk Population ◽  
Post Intervention ◽  
American Women

<p><strong>Objective: </strong>The Learning and Developing Individual Exercise Skills (L.A.D.I.E.S.) for a Better Life study compared a faith-integrated (FI) and a secular (SEC) intervention for increasing physical activity with a self-guided (SG) control group among African American women. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Design/Setting/Participants: </strong>L.A.D.I.E.S. was a cluster randomized, controlled trial. Churches (n=31) were randomized and women within each church (n=12 – 15) received the same intervention. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Interventions: </strong>FI and SEC participants received 24 group-based sessions, delivered over 10 months. SG participants received printed materials to review independently for 10 months. Participants were followed for 12-months post-intervention to assess long-term intervention impact. </p><p><strong>Main Outcome Measures: </strong>Data on participant characteristics, physical activity, and intervention-related constructs were collected at baseline, 10 months, and 22 months. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Intervention session attendance was greater for FI compared with SEC participants (15.7 + 5.7 vs 12.4 + 7.3 sessions, respectively, P&lt;.01). After 10 months, FI and SEC participants significantly increased daily walking (+1,451 and +1,107 steps/ day, respectively) compared with SG participants (-128 steps/day). Increases were maintained after 22 months in the FI group compared with the SG group (+1092 vs. +336 daily steps, P&lt;.01). Between-group changes in accelerometer-assessed physical activity were not statistically significant at any time point. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>The FI intervention is a feasible strategy for short- and long-term increases in physical activity among African American women. Additional dissemination and evaluation of the strategy could be useful for reducing chronic disease in this high-risk population. <em></em></p><p><em>Ethn Dis.</em>2017;27(4):411- 420; doi:10.18865/ed.27.4.411. </p>

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