Spiritual interrogations : culture, gender, and community in early African American women's writing
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Spiritual interrogations : culture, gender, and community in early African American women's writing
（Princeton studies in culture/power/history）
Princeton University Press, c1999
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-175) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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ISBN 9780691016399
Description
This work is a 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. The 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 the author calls a "spiritual matrix" which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora.
- Volume
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: pbk ISBN 9780691016474
Description
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.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction3Ch. 1The Daughters' Arrival: Histories, Theories, Vernaculars10Ch. 2Diaspora Subjectivity and Transatlantic Crossings: Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Recovery28Ch. 3"The Too Advent'rous Strain": Slavery, Conversion, and Poetic Empowerment in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies58Ch. 4"Social Piety" in Ann Plato's Essays71Ch. 5"I Took a Text": Itinerancy, Community, and Intertextuality in Jarena Lee's Spiritual Narratives87Ch. 6Rituals of Desire: Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson108Ch. 7Performing Community: Culture, Community, and African American Subjectivity before Emancipation127Afterword: The Sacred Subject140Notes143Selected Bibliography165Index177
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