scholarly journals Cheryl Wall, In Memoriam

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-244
Author(s):  
Cora Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Associate Editor ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Board Of Governors ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
And Gender

The distinguished critic Professor Cheryl A. Wall (1948–2020) was the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her path-breaking scholarship in two highly influential monographs, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) and Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), helped to ensure that twentieth-century Black women writers were recognized and valued for their power, genius, and complexity. Her most recent book, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (2018), places the essay form at the center of African American literary achievement. Throughout her long career she supported and enabled Black students, and championed racial diversity and gender equality at every level of the university. An Associate Editor of James Baldwin Review, she was the most generous and astute of readers, as well as a wise editor. In this memorial section, fifteen colleagues, former students, and interlocutors share their remembrances and honor her legacy.

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.

Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1649-1672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlene R. Keizer
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
American Women ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Sexual Involvement ◽  
African American Artists

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.

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.

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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