Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (eBook, PDF)

Redaktion: Marsh-Lockett, Carol P.; West, Elizabeth J.

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. April 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798216299721
• Artikelnr.: 74847506

Autorenporträt

Carol P. Marsh-Lockett is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches courses and pursues scholarship in African American, Caribbean, and Postcolonial Literatures. In addition to published essays and articles in these areas as well as articles on Seventeenth Century English Literature, she is the editor of Decolonising Caribbean Literature (Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2) and Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage (Garland, 1999). She also co-edited (with Elizabeth J. West) Caribbean Women Writers in Exile: Anglophone Writings (Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.2). She is a former Womanist Scholar in Residence at The Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Elizabeth J. West received her PhD in English with a certificate in Women's Studies from Emory University. In her anthologized essays, as well as articles in American Studies Journal (Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), CLAJ, MELUS, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, SLI, and SCR, she focuses on gender, race and class, with particular interest in their intersections with the spiritual in early American and African American literary works. Her monograph, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction (Lexington Books, 2011) traces specific African spiritual sensibilities from early to modern black women's writings. She is among scholar interviewees for Georgia Public Broadcasting's 2011 documentary on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Her article, "From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael," has been recognized among "Featured Articles in American Studies" (American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources). She is a former AAUW Research Fellow and a ROOTS NEH Summer Seminar Participant (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia). She has served as a Special Delegate for the Modern Language Association, and she is currently Assistant Treasurer for the College Language Association.

Inhaltsangabe

Chapter 1: Introduction: African Spirituality and the Ameri-Atlantic World
Carol Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West
Section 1: Imagining African Faith Systems in the Postmodern World
Chapter 2: The Gods Who Speak in Many Voices, and in None: African
Novelists on Indigenous and Colonial Religion
John C. Hawley
Chapter 3: Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton's
Voodoomation: A Book of Foretelling
Melvin Rahming
Chapter 4: From "Pythian Madness" to an "Inner Ethic of Self-Sacrifice":
The Spirits of Africa and Modernity in Du Bois's Late Writings
James Manigault-Bryant
Chapter 5: Rituals of Remembrance: Trauma, Memory, and Spiritual Practice
in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness
Erica L. Still
Section 2: Integrations of the African and the Western in New World Black
Atlantic Writing
Chapter 6: The Body of Vodou: Corporeality and the Location of Gender in
Afro-Diasporic Religion
Roberto Strongman
Chapter 7: Hoodoo Ladies and High Conjurers: New Directions for an Old
Archetype
Kameelah Martin
Chapter 8: From Africa to America by Way of the Caribbean: Fictionalized
Histories of the Diasporic Slave Woman's Presence in America
Artress Bethany White
Section 3: African Deities and Divinations as Forces in New World Black
Works
Chapter 9: Expressions of African-Based Spirituality in Edwidge Danticat's
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Beauty Bragg
Chapter 10: Waiting for Olodumare: Ishmael Reed and the Recovery of Yoruba"
Darryl Dickson-Carr
Chapter 11: Testing and Changing: Esu and Oya 'Making it Do What it Do' in
The Best Man
Georgene Bess Montgomery
Chapter 12: Cuban Utopianism and Haitian Messiah: Spiritual Provocations of
Collective Catalyst in Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew
Mario Chandler