Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature

by T. Harris

Overview

Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in several literary works of the twentieth century. Authors of these works draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations. Instead, strength becomes a problematic trait, at times a disease, in many characters in which it appears. It has a detrimental impact on the relatives and neighbors of such women as well as on the women themselves. The pattern of portraying women characters as strong in African American literature has become so pronounced that it has stifled the literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312293031
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	02/18/2002
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

TRUDIER HARRIS is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Tony Morrison (1991), and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zona Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996). She has co-edited a number of influential works, including several volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction: The Black Female Body: Seeing, Believing, and Perpetuating Popular and Literary Images A Raisin in the Sun : The Strong Black Women as Acceptable Tyrant Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery I: Even Parody: Ishmael Reed and Mammy Barracuda Strength and the Battle Ground of Slavery II: Survival Beyond Survival: The Price of Strength in Beloved Commanding the Universe: I. More Than Witch: Bambara's Minnie Ransom II. Tough Enough to Kill, Tough Enough to Transcend Death: J. California Cooper's Clora Strength as Disease Bordering on Evil: Dorothy West's Cleo Judson The Stubbornness of Tradition: I. Do What Big Mama Sez: Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying II. New Territory, No Change: Pear; Cleage's Flyin' West Balance? Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower Conclusion Can this Mold be Broken?

Editorial Reviews

'...vivid and provactive descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - Charlotte Observer

'...vivid and provocative descriptions of some of the great strong women characters of recent African American literature.' - D.G. Martin, Rocky Mount Telegram

From the Publisher

In this surprising, scholarly volume, Harris (The Power of the Porch) analyzes "the pathology of strength" that has become "a dominant pattern of development for black female character" in much of the literature taught in college African-American studies courses. An English professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Harris challengingly cites such works as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying and Toni Cade Bambera's The Salt Eaters to demonstrate a paradox: while "strength is undoubtedly a virtue," she writes, "it is frequently violating and destructive." (For example, the trend toward increasingly strong female characters discourages works featuring vulnerable ones, thereby stifling literary freedom.) Detailing representations of African-American women in 20th-century fiction, Harris reveals the extent to which "African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated." Harris is not without sympathy and even admiration for many aspects of these characters, even as she shows links between A Raisin in the Sun's Mama Lena and contemporary TV's fondness for large, strong and comic black female characters. The detail can be deadening so many textual citations; so much time spent on arguments but the thesis is provocative, even when it's not entirely convincing. (Dec.) Forecast: Harris's largely esoteric tone suggests that her book is destined for college classrooms. Its counterintuitive thesis and studious avoidance of lit-crit jargon will ensure a willing audience of students of American and African-American literature. Copyright 2001Cahners Business Information.

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