scholarly journals It takes a village: Twentieth Century black women's fiction and the spiritual apprenticeship narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Constance Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Way

This dissertation looks at nine works by contemporary black women writers and argues that the relationships between the major characters in the text reflect and emphasize the importance of mentoring bonds in black communities. More importantly, the project argues that by critically exploring this relationship we can come come to understand more about coming of narratives written by black women writers. These works suggest that there is a marked difference in the way that black people, black women in particular, mature, become successfully integrated into society, and deal with personal and communal crises.

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.

In Search of Our Mama’s Porn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Reproductive Freedom ◽  
Guerilla Warfare ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Reciprocal Interactions ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a brief analysis of the sexual and racial politics of the Life Always antichoice billboard campaign. It argues that black women writers' participation in what might be considered pornographic industries promotes a form of guerilla warfare, whose objective is to protect and secure women's erotic sovereignty and reproductive freedom. While funk and porn have each been hystericized as the province of men, funk is also viewed as an affective technology that can sustain reciprocal interactions that would improve the lives of women and, in the end, the men and children in their lives. The chapter shows how the way women pursue the terms of their liberation underscores the radical possibilities of what it means to desire versus to be an object of desire, and to create versus to produce.

From Blaxploitation to Black Macho

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-201
Author(s):  
Terrion L. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Ntozake Shange ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Women Writers

For commentators concerned with black cultural production in the contemporary era, there are few images more controversial than the angry black woman, particularly as it is reproduced within the confines of reality television. This chapter traces the lineage of the angry black woman back to key black feminist texts of the 1970s, arguing that the trope emerges out of a distinct sociopolitical history that was codified within both public policy and popular culture throughout the decade. Blaxploitation films became the site where black women’s anger was most visibly commodified, even as black women involved in an emergent black feminist movement worked to combat withering social commentaries that included Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s matriarchy thesis and sexist takedowns of black women writers like Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace.

Protesting the Privilege of Perception

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-227
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter explores how Hale County, Alabama became an iconic site of documentary representation during the twentieth century and why some its poor black and white residents resisted the attempts of documentarians to turn their private lives into public symbols. The chapter begins by examining the collaboration between two local white documentarians, amateur folklorist and poet, Martha Young and photographer J.W. Otts, who recorded the lives and customs of Hale County’s rural black people in the early 1900s. It focuses on Young’s dialect poems that speak from the perspective of black women who refused to be photographed by whites and who saw photography as an exploitative medium. Next, the chapter demonstrates how this narrative and tradition of resistance to documentary continued during the 1930s. It explores the resistance writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans faced in the 1930s from some of the white tenant families they documented for their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it shows how their descendants often found new ways to resist documentarians and journalists in succeeding decades. These acts of resistance transformed poor black and white residents into actors rather than just icons in the documentary process.

The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Calvin Hernton
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Women Writers

Black Women Writers Visit Cuba

1985 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 61-61
Author(s):  
Jayne Cortez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Women Writers
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