scholarly journals “Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Lisa Fink
Keyword(s):  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Insurance Case ◽  
A Site ◽  
Postcolonial Ecocriticism

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

scholarly journals Poetry as Praxis + “Illumination”: Toward an Epistemically Just Health Promotion for Resistance, Healing, and (Re)Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 20S-26S
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Petteway
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Black Feminist Theory ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
A Site

Health promotion is facing a most challenging future in the intersections of structural racism, COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), racialized police violence, and climate change. Now is a critical moment to ask how health promotion might become more responsive to and representative of people’s daily realities. Also how it can become a more inclusive partner in, and collaborative conduit of, knowledge—one capable of both informing intellects and transforming hearts. It needs to feel the pulse of the “fierce urgency of now,” and perhaps nothing can reveal this pulse more than the creative power of art—especially poetry. Drawing from critical and Black feminist theory, I use commentary in prose to conceptualize and call for an epistemically just health promotion guided by poetry as praxis—not just as method. I posit that, as praxis rooted in lived realities, poetry becomes experiential excavation and illumination; a practice of community, communion, and solidarity; a site and source of healing; and a space to create new narratives of health to forge new paths toward its promotion. I accordingly suggest a need to view and value poetry as a critical scholarship format to advance health promotion knowledge, discourse, and action toward a more humanized pursuit—and narrative—of health equity.

Pushed to Teach: Pedagogies and Policies for a Black Women Educator Pipeline

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conra D. Gist ◽  
Terrenda White ◽  
Margarita Bianco
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Educational Equity ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Collective Learning ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
12Th Grade ◽  
Educational Spaces ◽  
Feminist Theories

This research study examines the learning experiences of 11th- and 12th-grade Black girls participating in a precollegiate program committed to increasing the number of Teachers of Color entering the profession by viewing a teaching career as an act of social justice committed to educational equity. The pipeline functions as an education reform structure to disrupt pedagogies and policies that push Black girls out of educational spaces at disproportionate rates by instead pushing Black girls to teach. Critical race and Black feminist theories are utilized to analyze interviews from Black girls over a 5-year period of the program and composite characters are developed to spotlight key findings that allow us to (a) better understand and amplify the collective learning and social-emotional experiences of Black girls in the program, (b) highlight and critique the challenges and possibilities for positively pushing Black girls’ intellectual identities as students and future teachers via pedagogies and supports, (c) identify spaces and structures in schools that can resist and combat the marginalization of Black girls’ agency and genius, and (d) consider implications for the development of Black Women Educator pipelines.

Made in the (Multicultural) U.S.A.: Unpacking Tensions of Race, Culture, Gender, and Sexuality in Education

2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Asher
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Multicultural Teacher Education ◽  
Education Practice ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
A Site ◽  
Multicultural Teacher

The author discusses the challenges of educating teachers to engage, rather than deny or repress, differences that emerge at the dynamic, context-specific intersections of race, culture, gender, and sexuality. Although multicultural education discourse is well established, stereotypic representations and repressive silences persist in the sphere of practice. Interweaving postcolonial and feminist theories with reflections emerging from her multicultural teacher education practice, the author highlights tensions of doing multicultural work. She discusses how silencing forces operate even in seemingly “open” micro and macro contexts. To illustrate these arguments, the author engages two areas that have received limited attention in multicultural discourse itself: representations of Asian Americans and differences of sexuality. She recommends that the multicultural teacher education classroom serve as a site for modeling critical, self-reflexive engagement with difference and democratic participation, even as she acknowledges the limits of individual efforts in the process of educational and social change.

Palestinian Oral Tradtions and the ‘Sanctity’ of Damascus: A Critical Analysis of a Palestinian Seventeenth-Century Manuscript

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-221
Author(s):  
Ghaleb Anabseh ◽  
Nader Masarwah
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
A Site ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
String Of Pearls

This article explores the concept of the ‘Holy Land’ as reflected in a Palestinian seventeenth-century manuscript: A String of Pearls in Praise of al-Sham, by Muhammad Habib, and in light of the considerable output of works on the ‘virtues of the Holy Land’ by Muslim writers in Palestine and Syria. Although these writers composed their works using materials from traditional sources (religious, historical, geographical), the key issue explored here is the use of Palestinian oral and local traditions which were not always consistent with official or orthodox Islamic thought and thus local traditions which remained outside the bounds of official hadith compilations. This study explore the role played by local or oral traditions in highlighting the sanctity of a city or a site in Palestine and Syria.

scholarly journals Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Sula and A Mercy: Rethinking (M)Othering

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Natália Fontes de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Biological Determinants

Motherhood tends to elicit strong feelings in women as well as a passionate rhetoric in our cultural discourse. Daughters have extensively been the focus of studies about mother-daughter bonds. Surprisingly, much less attention has been given to mother figures. By tracing the theme of motherhood in Sula (1973) and A Mercy (2009), I investigate how Toni Morrison rewrites the experiences of black mothers during slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Drawing mainly on feminist and black feminist theories, I explore, through literary analysis, how motherhood assumes various forms in both novels. The comparative analysis of Sula and A Mercy challenges distorted views commonly associated with the black mother and extends notions of mothering beyond biological determinants.

scholarly journals Magic Realism in African Literature: A Study on Selected Works of Ben Okri and Nadine Gordimer

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 148-156
Author(s):  
Mahesh Chandra Tiwari
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
African Writers ◽  
Ben Okri ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
A Site

This article examines the evolution of magical realism as a narrative style used by African writers throughout the transition period, and how it became increasingly suited to African literary sensibilities at the time. At the same time, magical realism relies heavily on African oral traditions, serving as a site of convergence for black and white writing under apartheid, as well as exemplifying the synthesis of Eurocentric Western logic and African tradition. This article discusses the possible origins of the proliferation of African texts embracing this narrative mode in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's demise, as well as the possible reasons for the gradual abandonment of magical realist narrative strategy in the post-millennial era, while discussing magic realism in relation to Ben Okri's and Nadine Gordimer's post-apartheid novels. As a consequence of the short cohabitation of the two literary forms in African literary history, African magical realism works will be located at the intersection of celebration and disillusionment literature.

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