In Praise Of Black Women Modern Women Of The Diaspora

A magnificently illustrated tribute to Black women in art and story; In Praise of Black Women is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African Diaspora from the ancient past to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. Volume 1: Ancient African Queens weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and traveller's' tales from Egypt to southern Africa, from prehistory to the nineteenth century. These extraordinary women's stories, narrated in the style of African oral tradition, are absorbing, informative, and accessible. The abundant illustrations, many of them rare archival images, depict the diversity among Black women and make this volume a unique treasure for every art lover, every school, and every family.

Celebrates the lives, cultures, and accomplishments of 14 women, born between 1850 and 1950, who have influenced African politics, literature, religion, and fashion.

Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Mary Prince represent the best of African American women writers who draw on the tortuous legacy of their people as a source for their art, revealing and defining themselves as they create compelling narratives that illuminate their roots, their heritage, and their unique culture. The themes that suffuse their writing are family, community, strong women, cultural memory, oral history, and slavery. By analyzing the works of these four remarkable writers, the study shows how today's black woman can take control of her destiny by coming to grips with an obscured and distorted past. These original essays articulate the way in which historical awareness, sensitivity to language, and an understanding of stereotypes can empower enduring artistic visions in a world that is largely indifferent to marginal voices.

In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.

African Literature Association Book of the Year Award in Scholarship – Honorable Mention Using feminist and womanist theory, Simone Alexander takes as her main point of analysis literary works that focus on the black female body as the physical and metaphorical site of migration. She shows that over time black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society. Through in-depth study of selective texts by Audre Lorde, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé, and Grace Nichols, Alexander challenges the stereotypes ascribed to black female sexuality, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, or docile. She also addresses issues of embodiment as she analyses how women’s bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge and disrupt normative standards. A multifaceted contribution to studies of gender, race, sexuality and disability issues, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives engages with a range of issues as it grapples with the complex interconnectedness of geography, citizenship, and nationalism.

This photo book portrays 10 women of the African diaspora wearing modern looks of traditional fabrics from the continent in Guinea, West Africa; Oakland, California (U.S.); and Paris, France, embracing their authentic selves and natural beauty. Featured are the extraordinary stories of these ordinary women, with each chapter introduced by original art pieces and historical anecdotes, highlighting social and political movements, its global impact, as well as the migration of the diaspora to and within the U.S. and France. Women of the African Diaspora makes a declaration for us to bear witness to our lived experience, love ourselves and impart our knowledge to the young women and girls in our global community. This inspirational book intrigues and encourages readers to reflect on identity and belonging with relevant affirmations dispersed throughout. Foreword by Yomi Abiola, Founder of the Fem League and Cultural Curiosity committed to the advancement of women.

Tropes ranging from Houston Baker's "bluesman," to Henry Louis Gates' "signifyin'" to Geneva Smitherman's "talkin' and testifyin'" to bell hooks' "talking back" to Cheryl Wall's "worrying the line" all affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary tradition. The collection of essays in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora contributes to this tradition by theorizing the preeminence of voice and narration (and the consequences of their absence) in the literary and cultural performances of black women. Looking to work by such prominent black female authors as Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, among many others, Mae G. Henderson provides a deeply felt reflection on race and gender and their effects within the discourse of speaker and listener.

In this translation of Hommage a la femme noire (1988), the authors pay tribute in essays and color images to a group victimized by "scholarly neglect and racist assumptions." Featured African women include 19th-20th century activists, authors, one of the first black fashion models, and others going beyond tradition. Published as part of a UNESCO project for the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture/New York Public Library. 9.25x12 ". The correct ISBN is given on the dust jacket but not on the copyright page. V. 4 is expected in spring 2004. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like—from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue. “Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us. Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women’s freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers’ lessons? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements. Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.

This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material--corporeal and spatial--locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.