Cheryl Wall, In Memoriam

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.

The critical enterprise in translating Black women writers’ authorship: a description on Who slashed Celanire’s throat? and The Women of Tijucopapo

This paper is focused on the critical enterprise involved in the translation of Black female authorship from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American contexts into the English language. More specifically, it looks at the circumstances of the translation of the fictional narratives Célanire cou-coupé (2000) by the Guadeloupian Maryse Condé and As mulheres de Tijucopapo (1982) by the Brazilian Marilene Felinto, as well as the publications of the versions in English: Who slashed Celanire’s Throat? (2004) and The Wo­men of Tijucopapo (1994), respectively. We take on a cultural perspective within the field of translation studies and it may be inserted within the theoretical and descriptive branch, being product-process oriented. From general cultural social theories, we draw on the works of Black female intellectuals, Lélia Gonzalez, Patricia Hill-Collins, Denise Carrascosa, and many others, in dialogue with the perspectives of cultural theorists from translation studies, André Lefevere, Lawrence Venuti, and others. Based on the models of descriptive analysis within this field by Gideon Toury and others, we propose a description of the translation (process and product) of Condé’s and Felinto’s novels.

Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

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.

Reimagining Liberation

In the 20th century, black women in the French empire played crucial leadership roles in anticolonial movements. This book harnesses untapped archival documents to highlight the work of Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita and Eslanda Robeson, women who remain relatively understudied in scholarship that continues to privilege male politicians and writers. Examining the literary production and political activism of African, Antillean, Guyanese and African American women, this book argues that black women writers and thinkers articulated multi-layered forms of citizenship that emphasized plural cultural and racial identities in direct opposition to colonialism. Their decolonial citizenship expanded the possibilities of belonging beyond the borders of the nation state and even the French empire to imagine transnational Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices.