CULTURAL- AND SELF-IDENTIFICATION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY: MAYA ANGELOU, SONIA SANCHEZ, AUDRE LORDE

Author(s):  
Olga Dolgusheva

The paper addresses the issue of cultural- and self-identification as constituted by African American women poets. The question of identification in the analyzed poems by Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde is viewed mostly from a multicultural perspective, which includes ethnic, national, racial and gender awareness. The author also discusses linguistic and rhetorical means that secure the identification on the textual level. They include conceptual and linguistic oppositions and dichotomies, allusions to precedent names, usage of music and tale-telling patterns, lexical and syntactical repetitions, etc. A special emphasis is made on the dialogic nature of poetry that is viewed as a linking chord between generations or community members in transmitting cultural codes. The theoretical framework of the paper is outlined by the ideas of women studies, US history and literature studies within the multiculturalist paradigm.

Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.


Author(s):  
Dayo F. Gore

This essay examines the experiences of African American women living in China during the early 1960s as many black activists began to look to Asia for other models for revolutionary transformation and global anti-imperialist struggle. The essay centers on Vicki Garvin, who settled in China after 1964. The essay charts Garvin’s experiences as a teacher in Shanghai and as a representative of black radicalism in China from 1964 to 1970. The writing is particularly attentive to Garvin’s negotiations of life and gender politics during the start of the Cultural Revolution as Mao pronounced his support for black liberation struggles in the US and a powerful Third World solidarity (and anti-Vietnam war movement) arose in the States.


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