Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Reading Black, Reading Feminist PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452010454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that explore the rich cultural history of black women in America. Black women’s writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here, leading literary critics—both male and female, black and white—look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, and survivors. Important writers whose work and lives are explored include Toni Morrison, Gloria Gaynor, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, and the fascinating list of essays range from Nellie Y. McKay’s “The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois” to Jewelle L Gomez’s very personal tribute to Lorraine Hansberry as a dramatist and crusader for social justice. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of this anthology and a noted authority on African-American literature, has provided a thought-provoking introduction that celebrates the experience of “reading black, reading feminist.” A penetrating look at women’s writing from a unique perspective, this superb collection brings to light the rich heritage of literary creativity among African-American women. “Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for survival?”—Mary Helen Washington, from her essay in Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Reading Black, Reading Feminist PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452010454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
A unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays that explore the rich cultural history of black women in America. Black women’s writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. Here, leading literary critics—both male and female, black and white—look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, and survivors. Important writers whose work and lives are explored include Toni Morrison, Gloria Gaynor, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, and the fascinating list of essays range from Nellie Y. McKay’s “The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois” to Jewelle L Gomez’s very personal tribute to Lorraine Hansberry as a dramatist and crusader for social justice. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of this anthology and a noted authority on African-American literature, has provided a thought-provoking introduction that celebrates the experience of “reading black, reading feminist.” A penetrating look at women’s writing from a unique perspective, this superb collection brings to light the rich heritage of literary creativity among African-American women. “Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for survival?”—Mary Helen Washington, from her essay in Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Reading Black, Reading Feminist PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780685389140
Category : African American women in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Black women's writing has finally emerged as one of the most dynamic fields of American literature. This unique and comprehensive collection of 26 literary essays provides real evidence of a rich cultural history of black women in America. Here, leading literary critics--both male and female, black and white--look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, survivors ... Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the editor of this anthology and a noted authority on African-American literature, has provided a thought-provoking introduction that celebrates the experience of "reading black, reading feminist". A penetrating look at women's writing from a unique perspective, this superb collection brings to light the rich heritage of literary creativity among African-American women. (Back cover).

A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade

A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade PDF Author: Andrea N. Baldwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000174980
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This book uses a decolonial Black feminist lens to understand the contemporary significance of the practices and politics of indifference in United States higher education. It illustrates how higher education institutions are complicit in maintaining dominant social norms that perpetuate difference. It weaves together Black feminisms, affect and queer theory to demonstrate that the ways in which human bodies are classified and normalized in societal and scientific terms contribute to how the minoritized and marginalized feel White higher education spaces. The text espouses a Black Feminist Shad(e)y Theoretics to read the university, by considering the historical positioning of the modern university as sites in which the modern body is made and remade through empirically reliable truth claims and how contemporary knowledges and academic disciplinary inheritances bear the fingerprints of racist sexist science even as the academy tries to disavow its inheritance through so-called inclusive practices and policies today. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Black feminism, Gender and women's studies, Black and ethnic studies, sociology, decoloniality, queer studies and affect theory.

Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence PDF Author: David Ikard
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Can black males offer useful insights on black women and patriarchy? Many black feminists are doubtful. Their skepticism derives in part from a history of explosive encounters with black men who blamed feminism for stigmatizing black men and undermining racial solidarity and in part from a perception that black male feminists are opportunists capitalizing on the current popularity of black women's writing and criticism. In Breaking the Silence, David Ikard goes boldly to the crux of this debate through a series of provocative readings of key African American texts that demonstrate the possibility and value of a viable black male feminist perspective. Seeking to advance the primary objectives of black feminism, Ikard provides literary models from Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog that consciously wrestle with the concept of victim status for black men and women. He looks at how complicity across gender lines, far from rooting out patriarchy in the black community, has allowed it to thrive. This complicity, Ikard explains, is a process by which victimized groups invest in victim status to the point that they unintentionally concede power to their victimizers and engage in patterns of behavior that are perceived as revolutionary but actually reinforce the status quo. While black feminism has fostered important and necessary discussions regarding the problems of patriarchy within the black community, little attention has been paid to the intersecting dynamics of complicity. By laying bare the nexus between victim status and complicity in oppression, Breaking the Silence charts a new direction for conceptualizing black women's complex humanity and provides the foundations for more expansive feminist approaches to resolving intraracial gender conflicts.

Not Just Race, Not Just Gender

Not Just Race, Not Just Gender PDF Author: Valerie Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135207917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
From the nineteenth century articulations of Sojourner Truth to contemporary thinkers like Patricia J. Williams, Black feminists have always recognized the mutual dependence of race and gender. Detailing these connections, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender explores the myriad ways race and gender shape lives and social practices. Resisting essentialist tendencies, Valerie Smith identifies black feminist theorizing as a strategy of reading rather than located in a particular subjective experience. Her intent is not to deny the validity of black women's lived experience, but rather to resist deploying a uniform model of black women's lives that actually undermines the power of black feminist thought. Whether reading race or gender in the Central Park jogger case or in contemporary media, like Livin'Large, Smith displays critical rigor that promises to change the way we think about race and gender.

Black Feminist Thought

Black Feminist Thought PDF Author: Patricia Hill Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135960135
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

Black Feminism Reimagined

Black Feminism Reimagined PDF Author: Jennifer C. Nash
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.

Black Feminist Archaeology

Black Feminist Archaeology PDF Author: Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Publisher: Left Coast Press
ISBN: 1598743791
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Whitney Battle-Baptiste outlines the basic tenets of Black feminist thought for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve historical archaeological practice.

The Black Body in Ecstasy

The Black Body in Ecstasy PDF Author: Jennifer C. Nash
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Digital Black Feminism

Digital Black Feminism PDF Author: Catherine Knight Steele
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479808385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--