Saints Sinners Survivors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, and: The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction (review)

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.

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Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature * Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature * Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

American Literature ◽

10.1215/00029831-1541004 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 84 (1) ◽

pp. 191-193

Author(s):

K. Sanchez-Eppler

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

African American ◽

Black Women ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature

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

F.B. Eyes ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691130200.003.0006 ◽

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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