Writing for Communal Healing: Mysticism and ‘Black Style’ in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-119
Author(s):  
Yiseul Won ◽  
Jonggab Kim
Keyword(s):  
Communal Healing

Colour symbolism and ideology in a Ghanaian healing movement

Africa ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Breidenbach
Keyword(s):  
Central Region ◽  
Communal Healing ◽  
Healing Ritual ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphIn 1970 and 1971 I spent fifteen months studying the ritual gatherings of a syncretistic healing movement popular among the coastal Fante of Ghana. The group is known as the ‘Nakabah people’ (the name of one of the founders) or more generally as The Twelve Apostles Church. On Fridays the Twelve Apostles gather for a healing ritual known to them as edwuma, the work, or sunsum edwuma, the working with spirits. On Sundays a prayer service called kyεpor, a pidgin term for ‘chapel’, is conducted. Both the edwuma and the kyεpor are performed in small communal healing centres of the movement designated as ‘gardens’. Most of these gardens are located in coastal fishing towns or inland agricultural villages up and down the coastline of Ghana's central region.

scholarly journals Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
National Space ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Communal Healing

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national space— following Winthrop’s foundational ideology. As I will argue, the novel contends that the revamped concept of communal home and familial bonds —echoing Winthrop’s emblem of national belonging— recasts the trope of biblical refuge as a potential tenet to foster selfassertion and to rethink the limits of belonging and acceptance.

scholarly journals “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That You Want to Be Well?”: The Politics of Mental Health and Long-Suffering in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 263
Author(s):  
Belinda Waller-Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Alternative Healing ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Communal Healing ◽  
Definition Of

In analyzing the woman-centered communal healing ceremony in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, this article considers how these types of womb-like spaces allow female protagonists to access ancestral and spiritual histories that assist them in navigating physical illnesses and mental health crises. It employs Bell Hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery alongside Arthur Kleinman’s definition of illness as social and transactional to demonstrate that the recognition of illness, and the actualization of wellness, necessitates collective and communal efforts informed by spiritual and cultural modes of knowledge, including alternative healing practices and ancestral mediation.

Oppositional Designs: Examining How Racial Identity Informs the Critical Design of Art and Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-109
Author(s):  
Krishnan Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Critical Design ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Communal Healing ◽  
Visual Discourses ◽  
Study Offer

AbstractThis study develops upon recent scholarship about subversive design that emerged in response to hegemonic structures such as capitalism, by introducing how racial identity informs disruptive design practices. Based upon a two-year ethnography with nine black artists during a period of racial unrest, this study presents how their experiences as black Americans informed distinctive, critical design dispositions. The participants’ deeply personal and labor-intensive design processes were both technical and political processes that involved intense prototyping, research and self-reflection. Their designs resulted in oppositional films, photography exhibits and paintings that contested racial metonymy through visceral and visual discourses that present black identities and histories within a more complex racial language. The participants also designed empathic spaces where oppositional discourses could take root and that supported communal healing, mourning and celebration. The ethnographic accounts of this study offer a meaningful way to engage and bridge scholarship about race, design and oppositional art.

Emerging from the reds, greens and stripped screws: a communal healing process

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phia van der Watt
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Critical Elements ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Group Context ◽  
Support Programme ◽  
Transformative Action ◽  
Communal Healing ◽  
Development Context

Abstract The article posits that the field of community development does not adequately engage with intergenerational communal wounding. A family support programme, developed in vulnerable communities in South Africa, was used as case study to investigate the feasibility of healing within community development. The articulation of a clear storyline to guide the process was identified as critical. The programme’s storyline unfolded in four episodes: facing the past (reds and greens); exploring current manifestations thereof (labels, secrets, obscured desires and projections); naming debilitating problems (the screws) to elicit a yearning for healing and action and creating new life stories. Reflection and mirroring through group work were identified as critical elements in this approach. The study concludes that while participants originally accepted the (false) messages/images resulting from oppression and discrimination uncritically, a more authentic self gradually emerged, which directed transformative action (underscoring the Freirean concept of conscientisation). The study invites further debate/research on issues, such as personal healing within group context; the dilemma of risk-and-failure; the slow nature of healing versus organisational demands; and the balance between promises for material improvement and healing. The study shows that communal healing work is both feasible and critically needed within the community development context and offers a practical way to realise this.

scholarly journals “Bringing Things Together"

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Joanna Ziarkowska
Keyword(s):  
Native Languages ◽  
Interesting Comment ◽  
Communal Healing

The article applies the concept of tribalography, as defined by LeAnne Howe, to examine two novels by Frances Washburn, Elsie's Business and The Sacred White Turkey in order to demonstrate how Washburn participates in the discourse of native languages revitalization and thus offers an interesting comment on the potential of communal healing.

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