Rituals of Restorative Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory

Using a womanist auto-ethnographic approach, this essay presents an anamnestic remedy for healing cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American community. The essay narrates the creation then infusion of rituals of restorative resistance into the liturgy of a traditional, urban black Baptist Church as a means of resistance, resilience, and restoration. By commemorating the sacrifices of Jesus and enslaved African ancestors in eucharist rituals that are enhanced with sacred songs, readings, and symbols, the liturgy expands the meaning of “Do This in Remembrance of Me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) to “Re-Member Me.” Drawing especially on work of Engelbert Mveng, Delores S. Williams, Barbara A. Holmes, Linda E. Thomas, and JoAnne Marie Terrell, and combining theology and anthropology, the essay describes a hermeneutic of healing within the community. It argues (1) that participation in enactment of rituals of restorative resistance decolonizes minds and deconstructs negative Western characterizations of black and brown bodies and (2) that ritualistic inversion and transformation of painful histories and traumatic stories into narratives and symbols of endurance and faith can re-invent, re-construct, and re-member individuals and communities into whole and healed entities.

The Ghanaian PCG Tent Women Clergy as Revolutionaries

Since 1979, after attaining access to most roles in Ghanaian society and churches, ordained women in various communities have combined duties as Christian ministers with their duties in other professions. The term “tent” refers the women clergy who also are teachers, nurses, medical doctors, bankers, politicians, lawyers, farmers, traders, engineers, professors, soldiers, and more. They successfully combine roles to make themselves revolutionaries. Using library and archival materials as well as data from field research, this study reveals that women leaders in church and society are merging professions so effectively that they deserve acknowledgement for important ministry contributions, especially to the advancement of women. The study recommends that women should be partnered equally with men in their role performance in the church and society.

Pelas mãos das mulheres negras: construindo uma Justiça com equidade

O presente artigo tem por objetivo evidenciar a necessidade de inclusão de mulheres negras no sistema de justiça brasileiro para a promoção de uma Justiça com equidade. O estudo demonstra como as opressões interseccionais de raça e gênero – às quais as mulheres negras estiveram submetidas ao longo da história colonialista escravocrata do Brasil – seguem condicionando o acesso de mulheres negras aos espaços de poder, notadamente ao sistema de justiça brasileiro. São apresentados dados que revelam os efeitos do racismo e do sexismo institucionais na atuação dos operadores do Direito, salientando como a escassez de mulheres negras – categoria social de maior vulnerabilidade na sociedade brasileira – resulta numa visão única, brancocêntrica e androcêntrica, a ponto de converter a realização de Justiça num privilégio do homem branco. Sob essa perspectiva, defende-se que a mulher negra se encontra numa espécie de encruzilhada interseccional que, se de um lado, reforça suas vulnerabilidades sociais, de outro, potencializa sua capacidade de promover uma transformação epistemológica e hermenêutica nos órgãos do sistema de justiça, para a construção de uma Justiça com equidade de gênero e de raça.

Womanist Spirit and Womanist Healing for Sandra Bland and George Floyd

Womanist thought offers a holistic worldview from which to interpret the deaths of Sandra Bland and George Floyd. Alice Walker, in the novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, introduces the Grandmother Spirit, a figure of the Great Spirit, an important element in Walker’s definition of what it means to be “womanist.” The Grandmother informs the action of Grand Mothers, both living and ancestor, who offer potential healing to Black people under violence, including death at the hands of police. The article analyzes one episode in the novel, Lalika’s arrest and rape by police, and the appearance of an ancestral Grand Mother, Saartjie Bartmann, who sustains Lalika. After exploring this visitation of spirits, the article turns to the cases of Sandra Bland, for whom no ancestor appeared, and George Floyd, for whom his mother and a host of Grand Mother witnesses, did appear. The article concludes with an examination of Walker’s essay “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” in which she meditates on intergenerational interconnectedness and truth-telling and suggests art as a site of imaginative justice.

By Black Women’s Hands: Building Equitable Justice

The article evinces the need for the inclusion of Black women in the Brazilian justice system if equitable justice is to be achieved. The intersecting oppressions of race and gender to which Black women have been subjected down through the colonialist, slave-owning history of Brazil are still conditioning Black women’s access to spaces of power, notedly in the Brazilian justice system. Data are presented that illustrate the effects of institutional racism and sexism on justice officials, particularly how the dearth of Black women – the most vulnerabilized social category in Brazilian society – produces a single, white-centric, androcentric interpretation that ultimately makes the achievement of justice a white man’s privilege. From this perspective, Black women find themselves at a kind of intersectional crossroads that, on one hand, reinforces their social vulnerabilities while, on the other hand, it potentializes their ability to foster an epistemological, hermeneutic transformation inside the justice system, aimed at building a system that incorporates gender and race equity.

“Have You Eaten?” Portrayals of Deviant Women in Nollywood

This paper explores filmic representations of womanhood in Nollywood, Nigeria’s largest film industry. Focusing on three different films over the span of 10 years, the essay argues that Nollywood’s engagements with Christian moral norms significantly impacts its portrayals of women, producing specific narratives around deviance and its accompanying failures of womanhood. It also shows how these narratives are differentiated through social class, as they highlight the institutionalized capitalist-sexist nature of the professional sphere women have to navigate. Traversing the public-private spheres, these narratives reveal the social pressures that simultaneously produce and disrupt ideas of womanhood. By analyzing the films, the essay posits that Nollywood’s representation of women reflects contemporary social anxieties about modernity, capitalism and morality, which are in turn refracted through the image of the deviant woman.

Absence and Presence – Living the Mystery: A Model of Care for African American Women Using the Theory of Ambiguous Loss

This paper re-conceptualizes the theory of ambiguous loss to engage historical and contemporary realties of African American women’s lived experiences. Ambiguous Loss theory suggests that a family member can be emotionally or psychologically present but physically absent or physically present but psychologically absent. The paper asserts that African American women always have lived with ambiguity and suggests reclaiming tenets of the theory. As a case study, the paper uses the lives of women in Ava DuVerney’s Queen Sugar and lyrics of the series’ theme song to explore the dilemma of expected ways of being (“keep the color in the line”) alongside desire (“dreams never dying”) and hopes (“taking flight”). The paper encourages African American women to pursue healing while living the mystery while unapologetically reclaiming and reframing what it means to live with ambiguity. It proposes a model of care that centralizes spirit and spirit work, rituals and music and dance, radical socialization, creating a spirit space for inner well-being, using power from the periphery, reclaiming collective memories, and leaving a signpost for the generations to remember.