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Searching for Sycoraxhighlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory. Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror's ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror's semiotics within their own imaginary. Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare's Sycorax (ofThe Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

This collection chronicles the strategic uses of madness in works by black women fiction writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Moving from an over-reliance on the \"madwoman\" as a romanticized figure constructed in opposition to the status quo, contributors to this volume examine how black women authors use madness, trauma, mental illness, and psychopathology as a refraction of cultural contradictions, psychosocial fissures, and political tensions of the larger social systems in which their diverse literary works are set through a cultural studies approach. The volume is constructed in three sections: Revisiting the Archive, Reinscribing Its Texts: Slavery and Madness as Historical Contestation, The Contradictions of Witnessing in Conflict Zones: Trauma and Testimony, and Novel Form, Mythic Space: Syncretic Rituals as Healing Balm. The novels under review re-envision the initial trauma of slavery and imperialism, both acknowledging the impact of these events on diasporic populations and expanding the discourse beyond that framework. Through madness and healing as sites of psychic return, these novels become contemporary parables of cultural resistance.

Despite being considered a key text in African American literary history especially after its reevaluation in the 1980s, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper has generally been dismissed by critics for its aesthetic and political accommodationism, bourgeois didacticism, and alleged historical amnesia. Most of these critical evaluations focus exclusively on Iola’s character. Situating Iola Leroy in its cultural and political context, this article rereads Iola’s character in relation to other women characters to argue that Harper’s text conceives a “New Negro Woman” as a counterpart of the New Negro man, long before the term became popularized. Even more, this “New Negro Woman” is shaped by African American racial heritage alongside postbellum racial uplift ideology contra the dominant “bourgeois” conceptions of the New Negro that “buried” the past in an attempt to “escape the recollection of enslavement” Gates, 1988, 139.

Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: * re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings * tourist ideologies and playful world travelling * gender, heritage and identity * African women's writing and resistance to domination * marginality, effacement and decentering * gender, language and the politics of location Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experien.

I approach Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices as a documentary fiction to show how Wright first depicts the “we” vs. “you” dichotomy between white and African Americans but then invites both to leave behind the “we” vs. “you” and embrace a “we + you.”

The plays Harlem duet (1997) by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and Desdemona (2012) by Toni Morrison signify upon European texts aiming to carve out a new definition of what it means to be black in North America. Therefore both texts make for interesting reading in the study of (black) identity construction within US and Canadian contexts for, by revising Shakespeare’s Othello, they rethink and rewrite a social and racial reality unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity. Sears’ play establishes a specific reading of Canadianness in dialogue with African America to erect a possibility of healing and inclusion, offering a feminist vision of the black self. Similarly, Morrison inscribes the voice of Africa within the US to conclude Sears’ account of a feminist and transnational subjectivity for blacks in North America. By reversing the manly ethos that characterized Shakespeare’s story and bringing the role of women to the front, both plays succeed in readjusting the Shakespearean story to render a feminist, transnational, cosmopolitan and democratic definition of the black female self.

Like Spillers in the epigraph to this essay, Oliver implies that the markings on and sufferings of past bodies \"transfer\" symbolically and representationally - that past bodily experiences and inscriptions shape contemporary meanings of blackness and black female identity.1 Spillers expands on this idea, stating, \"In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness\" (257). [...] consider the poem \"summon, she said, her by the name you loved\": what was I supposed to say the possibility of your breasts more enticing more beautiful than a threat of rain across hard earth, the scribes lost their way somewhere between the native wailing ghosts of new mexico and south carolina cotton fields, or was there sugarcane there, someone who knows should teil the urban black kids of uzi mtv and comic strip breakfasts, hail the gains of integration and cross the divide of race mythology, something is always lost when something is gained, who was prepared to pay the price for memory's transference from the sacred to the profane, from porkchops to mcdonalds. working backwards.

This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by 'Africa' and 'Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference. Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by: Toni Morrison Alice Walker Gloria Naylor Ngugi Wa Thiong'o Chinua Achebe V.S. Naipaul For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.

What is most important is that in the 1850s black women writers, born former slaves and freewomen, began for me first time to speak in their own voices about slavery and race in a way mat even a deeply sympathetic white writer like Stowe could not equal. [...] they began to write about their lives as women and Americans.