Black Feminist Triptych

Two driving features of Black feminism are care and collectivity. This article considers them as vectors for Christian preaching. I focus on a specific speech event that involves Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and June Jordan, and treat it as a case study for Black feminist preaching. Ultimately, I propose a triptych approach to preaching that entails layering sermonic messages, accommodating dissonance, and foregrounding mutuality.

Practicing Love

This article studies love as a distinct, transformative, and radical Black feminist politic. By closely sitting with the work of Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, this article treats love-politics as another political tradition that has emerged from within the parameters of Black feminist thought, one that challenges the political tradition most closely associated with Black feminist thought: intersectionality.

Call (On) Your “Mutha’ ”

Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.

Stories, Bodies, Movements

Can the ways of knowing and being co-developed with SKMS and Parakh be reworked pedagogically in a public research university? This exploration births a combined undergraduate and graduate course, 'Stories, Bodies, Movements,' which unfolds in the form of fifteen weekly 'Acts' and uses storytelling, writing, and theatre as modes of collective relearning. In absorbing the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, June Jordan, Nina Simone, Sujatha Gidla, Om Prakash Valmiki, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others, the Syllabus asks: What of ourselves must each member of the class offer in order to become an ethical receiver of the stories we are reading? And how might this commitment to ethically receive stories translate into an embodied journey that seeks to transform the self in relation to the collective?

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre. Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.