The Sisters Are Alright


Book Description

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”




Classic African American Women's Narratives


Book Description

Classic African American Women's Narratives offers teachers, students, and general readers a one-volume collection of the most memorable and important prose written by African American women before 1865. The book reproduces the canon of African American women's fiction and autobiography during the slavery era in U.S. history. Each text in the volume represents a "first." Maria Stewart's Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (1831) was the first political tract authored by an African American woman. Jarena Lee's Life and Religious Experience (1836) was the first African American woman's spiritual autobiography. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) was the first slave narrative to focus on the experience of a female slave in the United States. Frances E. W. Harper's "The Two Offers" (1859) was the first short story published by an African American woman. Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) was the first novel written by an African American woman. Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was the first autobiography authored by an African American woman. Charlotte Forten's "Life on the Sea Islands" (1864) was the first contribution by an African American woman to a major American literary magazine (the Atlantic Monthly). Complemented with an introduction by William L. Andrews, this is the only one-volume collection to gather the most important works of the first great era of African American women's writing.




A Black Women's History of the United States


Book Description

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States. An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.




Invented Lives


Book Description

Explores the works, & the worlds, of black American women writers between 1860 & 1960. Bringing together selected short stories & novel extracts from ten writers, she introduces a remarkable range of voices & draws out the hidden & overt challenges of a body of work rich in cultural, political & literary meaning. Also includes an introduction & six chapters in which the author examines black women writers' search for a narrative structure appropriate to their experiences in American society. The result is a stunning collection of prose & an eloquent affirmation of a neglected literary tradition.




Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds


Book Description

Stories by and about Black Women This superb collection of short stories features contributions from thirteen black women writers including Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and Toni Cade Bambara.




The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature


Book Description

The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature covers a period dating back to the eighteenth century. These specially commissioned essays highlight the artistry, complexity and diversity of a literary tradition that ranges from Lucy Terry to Toni Morrison. A wide range of topics are addressed, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, and from the performing arts to popular fiction. Together, the essays provide an invaluable guide to a rich, complex tradition of women writers in conversation with each other as they critique American society and influence American letters. Accessible and vibrant, with the needs of undergraduate students in mind, this Companion will be of great interest to anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this important and vital area of American literature.




Remaking Black Power


Book Description

In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women's artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.




Remaking Respectability


Book Description

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit. Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.




Female Subjectivity in African American Women's Narratives of Enslavement


Book Description

Female Subjectivity in African American Women s Narratives of Enslavement is a new and innovative study of black women s transformation, which focuses on black women writers who support the notion of separate location for a changed female consciousness. This book offers the concept of the "Transient Woman" as a new paradigm and feminist vision for analyzing female subjectivity and consciousness.




Self-discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative


Book Description

It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, she demonstrates the ways in which the act of narrating constitutes an act of self-fashioning that must be understood in the context of the Afro-American experience. Hers is a fertile investigation, attuned to the differences in male and female sensibilities, and attentive to the importance of oral traditions.