Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow

In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that un...