Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing / Edition 1

Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing / Edition 1

by Katherine Clay Bassard
ISBN-10:
069101647X
ISBN-13:
9780691016474
Pub. Date:
02/07/1999
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
ISBN-10:
069101647X
ISBN-13:
9780691016474
Pub. Date:
02/07/1999
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing / Edition 1

Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing / Edition 1

by Katherine Clay Bassard

Paperback

$47.0
Current price is , Original price is $47.0. You
$47.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
  • PICK UP IN STORE

    Your local store may have stock of this item.

  • SHIP THIS ITEM

    Temporarily Out of Stock Online

    Please check back later for updated availability.


Overview

The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people.


Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study—which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community—focuses on four women: the poet Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with African Methodism.


Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spirituals matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691016474
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 02/07/1999
Series: Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)
Age Range: 16 Years

About the Author

Katherine Clay Bassard is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have been published in African American Review and Callaloo.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction3
Ch. 1The Daughters' Arrival: Histories, Theories, Vernaculars10
Ch. 2Diaspora Subjectivity and Transatlantic Crossings: Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Recovery28
Ch. 3"The Too Advent'rous Strain": Slavery, Conversion, and Poetic Empowerment in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies58
Ch. 4"Social Piety" in Ann Plato's Essays71
Ch. 5"I Took a Text": Itinerancy, Community, and Intertextuality in Jarena Lee's Spiritual Narratives87
Ch. 6Rituals of Desire: Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson108
Ch. 7Performing Community: Culture, Community, and African American Subjectivity before Emancipation127
Afterword: The Sacred Subject140
Notes143
Selected Bibliography165
Index177
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews