Explores the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns in writings by African American and Native American women.
Bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this book offers fresh perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. The essays draw on interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods in the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams, making them more accessible for critical consideration in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. The contributors formulate unique frameworks for interpreting the multiple levels of complex, cultural play between Native American and African American women writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for reassessing writers of both traditions.
Table of Content
I. Introduction
1. On the ‘Res’ and in the ‘Hood’: Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies
Angela L. Cotten
II. Transformative Aesthetics
2. Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation
Ana Louise Keating
3. Making the Awakening Hers: Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity
Elizabeth J. West
4. ‘Any Woman’s Blues’: Sherley Anne Williams and the Blues Aesthetic
Michael A. Antonucci
III. Critical Revisions
5. Through the Mirror: Re-Surfacing and Self-Articulation in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
Ellen L. Arnold
6. The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian: Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility
Barbara S. Tracy
7. Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism
Angela L. Cotten
IV. Re(In)Fusing Feminism
8. ‘Both the Law and Its Transgression’: Toni Morrison’s Paradise and ‘Post’–Black Feminism
Noelle Morrissette
9. Luci Tapahonso’s ‘Leda and the Cowboy’: A Gynocratic, Navajo Response to Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’
Maggie Romigh
10. Mother Times Two: A Double Take on a Gynocentric Justice Song
Margot Reynolds
References
Contributors
Index
About the author
Angela L. Cotten is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. Christa Davis Acampora is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is coeditor (with Ralph R. Acampora) of A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal.
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