African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-399
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Women Writers

scholarly journals ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: A Serious Attempt at Representing the Diversity of the African- American Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Family Background ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Black Women Writers

Abstract:Racial and ethnic minority writers have only rarely paid any attention to the in-group diversity that one habitually finds in sociological surveys and statistics that classify results according to racial categories. ZZ Packer’s collection of short stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003) presents us with a set of mostly African-American female characters who, despite sharing the overt difference of their skin color, reveal a much wider range of “otherness” or alterity as they have to grapple with the boundaries that age, class, education, religion or family background mark out for them. The aim of this article is to show how Packer succeeds in transcending many of the age-old archetypes often used to analyze characters in texts by black women writers–e.g., the conjurer, the fallen woman, the freedom- ghter, etc.Keywords: African-American literature, short story, ZZ Packer, social categories, diversity, archetypes and stereotypes.Título en español: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere de ZZ Packer: Un intento de representar con rigor la diversidad de la experiencia afroamericanaResumen:Los escritores pertenecientes a distintas minorías étnicas solo prestan atención en contadas ocasiones a la enorme diversidad que se observa en las estadísticas y estudios sociológicos dentro de cada grupo. La recopilación de relatos Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003) de ZZ Packer nos muestra las experiencias de jóvenes afro-americanas que, además de compartir el rasgo distintivo del color de su piel, tienen que luchar también con las barreras impuestas por otros tipos de “alteridad” ligada a su edad, clase social, educación o religión. El objetivo principal de este artículo es demostrar que la autora consigue trascender en sus relatos los ya clásicos arquetipos que se utilizan para estudiar a los personajes femeninos en este tipo de ficción, tales como el de la hechicera, la mujer descarriada, la activista, etc.Palabras clave: Literatura afro-americana, relato corto, ZZ Packer, categorías sociales, diversidad, arquetipos y estereotipos. 

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 Set Thine House in Order: Black Feminism and the Sermon as Sonic Art in The Amen Corner

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 271
Author(s):  
Melanie R. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
Women Preachers

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois discusses the historical and cultural beginnings of the black preacher as “the most unique personality developed on American soil.” He writes, “[the black preacher] found his functions as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong…Thus as bard, physician, judge, and priest within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system rose the Negro preacher.” Far from being a monolith, the preacher figure embodies many complexities and variances on how the preached Word can be delivered. This begs the question, in what ways can we reimagine DuBois’s black preacher figure in his words, “the most unique personality developed on American soil,” as a black woman? What remains to be seen in scholarship of the mid-twentieth century is an articulation of the black woman preacher in African American literature. By reimagining and refiguring a response to DuBois’s assertion above, how is the role of the black woman preacher and impact of her sermons portrayed in African American literature? Using the art of the sermon, the intersection of music, and James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner as a central text, this article examines the black woman preacher in character and African American women’s spirituality in twentieth century literature. I argue that the way in which Margaret Alexander, as a black woman preacher in the text, creates sermonic spaces of healing and restoration (exegetically and eschatologically) for herself and others outside of the church becomes a new mode of social and cultural resistance. This article works to re-envision the black woman and reposition her in the center of religious discourse on our way to unearthing the modes of transfiguration black women preachers evoke in and out of the pulpit.

Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1649-1672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlene R. Keizer
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
American Women ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Sexual Involvement ◽  
African American Artists

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.

Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature

F.B. Eyes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Chester Himes ◽  
Danzy Senna ◽  
The One

This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.

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