Author: William Sanders Scarborough
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814348890
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
An important autobiography that reveals the story of William Sanders Scarborough who rose out of slavery to become a renowned classical philologist and African American icon. "If W.E.B Du Bois, the antecedent of today's black public intellectuals, himself has an antecedent, it is W. S. Scarborough, the black scholar's scholar." – Henry Louis Gates Jr. This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough's path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education. Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery's legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training. The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar. Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough's narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university records. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.
The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough
Author: William Sanders Scarborough
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814348890
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
An important autobiography that reveals the story of William Sanders Scarborough who rose out of slavery to become a renowned classical philologist and African American icon. "If W.E.B Du Bois, the antecedent of today's black public intellectuals, himself has an antecedent, it is W. S. Scarborough, the black scholar's scholar." – Henry Louis Gates Jr. This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough's path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education. Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery's legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training. The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar. Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough's narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university records. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814348890
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
An important autobiography that reveals the story of William Sanders Scarborough who rose out of slavery to become a renowned classical philologist and African American icon. "If W.E.B Du Bois, the antecedent of today's black public intellectuals, himself has an antecedent, it is W. S. Scarborough, the black scholar's scholar." – Henry Louis Gates Jr. This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough's path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education. Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery's legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training. The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar. Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough's narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university records. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.
The Works of William Sanders Scarborough
Author: William Sanders Scarborough
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195309626
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 557
Book Description
The first professional classicist of African American descent, William Sanders Scarborough rose from slavery to become president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Excelling at Latin and Greek, he crossed the color line both socially and intellectually with his entry into a field of study commonly seen as elitist and dominated by white men. Although unknown to classicists today, Scarborough had a distinguished career in the field and held membership in many learned societies and had an active publication record. His life as an engaged intellectual, public citizen, and concerned educator was admired and emulated by W. E. B. Du Bois.This collection, which spans a half a century from the end of Reconstruction through the vagaries of World War I and the rise of Jim Crow, gives us window we have not had before into the challenges and ambiguities of this period. As a committed intellectual, concerned educator and loyal citizen, he served as an ambassador to and for his race to several generations of people both in the U.S and abroad. In Scarborough's writings we have a portrait of a man whose struggle for physical and intellectual freedom can inform us all.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195309626
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 557
Book Description
The first professional classicist of African American descent, William Sanders Scarborough rose from slavery to become president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Excelling at Latin and Greek, he crossed the color line both socially and intellectually with his entry into a field of study commonly seen as elitist and dominated by white men. Although unknown to classicists today, Scarborough had a distinguished career in the field and held membership in many learned societies and had an active publication record. His life as an engaged intellectual, public citizen, and concerned educator was admired and emulated by W. E. B. Du Bois.This collection, which spans a half a century from the end of Reconstruction through the vagaries of World War I and the rise of Jim Crow, gives us window we have not had before into the challenges and ambiguities of this period. As a committed intellectual, concerned educator and loyal citizen, he served as an ambassador to and for his race to several generations of people both in the U.S and abroad. In Scarborough's writings we have a portrait of a man whose struggle for physical and intellectual freedom can inform us all.
Being Property Once Myself
Author: Joshua Bennett
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize “This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. “A gripping work...Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” —LSE Review of Books “These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.” —Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog “Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining.” —Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674980301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize “This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. “A gripping work...Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” —LSE Review of Books “These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.” —Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog “Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining.” —Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery
Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race
Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.
Thinking Through Crisis
Author: James Edward Ford
Publisher: Commonalities
ISBN: 9780823286904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for "European Man" that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of "bearing witness" yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.
Publisher: Commonalities
ISBN: 9780823286904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for "European Man" that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of "bearing witness" yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.
Freedom Time
Author: Anthony Reed
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
"In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed reclaims the power of black experimental poetry and prose by arguing that if literature fundamentally serves the human need for freedom in expression, then readers and critics must see it as something other than a reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. Prior to the successful campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and colonization in the Caribbean, literary politics seemed much more obviously interventionist. As more African Americans and Afro-Caribbean writers gained access to formal political power, more writing emerged whose political concerns went beyond improving racial representation, appealing for social recognition, raising consciousness, or commenting on the political disillusion and fragmentation of the post-segregation and post-colonial moments. Through formal innovation and abstraction, writers increasingly pushed the limits of representation and expression in order to extend the limits of thought and literary possibility. Reed offers a theoretical account of this new "black experimental writing," which is at once a literary historical development, and a concept with which to analyze the ways writing engages race and the possibilities of expression. One of his key interventions is arguing that form drives the politics literature, not vice-versa. Through extended analyses of works by N. H. Pritchard, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time draws out the political implication of their innovative approaches to literary aesthetics"--
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
"In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed reclaims the power of black experimental poetry and prose by arguing that if literature fundamentally serves the human need for freedom in expression, then readers and critics must see it as something other than a reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. Prior to the successful campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. and colonization in the Caribbean, literary politics seemed much more obviously interventionist. As more African Americans and Afro-Caribbean writers gained access to formal political power, more writing emerged whose political concerns went beyond improving racial representation, appealing for social recognition, raising consciousness, or commenting on the political disillusion and fragmentation of the post-segregation and post-colonial moments. Through formal innovation and abstraction, writers increasingly pushed the limits of representation and expression in order to extend the limits of thought and literary possibility. Reed offers a theoretical account of this new "black experimental writing," which is at once a literary historical development, and a concept with which to analyze the ways writing engages race and the possibilities of expression. One of his key interventions is arguing that form drives the politics literature, not vice-versa. Through extended analyses of works by N. H. Pritchard, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time draws out the political implication of their innovative approaches to literary aesthetics"--
The Matter of Black Living
Author: Autumn Womack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680691X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
"What did the "Negro problem," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, look like? Autumn Womack's study examines efforts to visualize Black social life through new technologies and disciplines-from photography and film to statistics-in the decades between 1880 and 1930. Womack describes nothing less than a "racial data revolution," one in which social scientists, reformers, and theorists rendered Black life an inanimate object of inquiry. At the very same time, Black cultural producers staged their own kind of revolution, undisciplining racial data in ways that challenged normative visual regimes and capturing the dynamism of Black social life. Womack focuses on figures like W.E.B DuBois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as lesser-known editors, social reformers, and performers. She shows how they harnessed media as diverse as the social survey, the novel, the stage, and early motion pictures to reform visual practices and recalibrate the relationship between data and black life"--
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680691X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
"What did the "Negro problem," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, look like? Autumn Womack's study examines efforts to visualize Black social life through new technologies and disciplines-from photography and film to statistics-in the decades between 1880 and 1930. Womack describes nothing less than a "racial data revolution," one in which social scientists, reformers, and theorists rendered Black life an inanimate object of inquiry. At the very same time, Black cultural producers staged their own kind of revolution, undisciplining racial data in ways that challenged normative visual regimes and capturing the dynamism of Black social life. Womack focuses on figures like W.E.B DuBois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as lesser-known editors, social reformers, and performers. She shows how they harnessed media as diverse as the social survey, the novel, the stage, and early motion pictures to reform visual practices and recalibrate the relationship between data and black life"--
Embodied Avatars
Author: Uri McMillan
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479852473
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
"Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, McMillian contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self-objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment."--Back cover.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479852473
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
"Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, McMillian contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self-objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment."--Back cover.
Half in Shadow
Author: Shanna Greene Benjamin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469661896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469661896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
Difficult Diasporas
Author: Samantha Pinto
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814759483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies. Samantha Pinto is Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University. In the American Literatures Initiative
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814759483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies. Samantha Pinto is Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University. In the American Literatures Initiative