“My Soul Is A Witness”: Reimagining African American Women’s Spirituality and the Black Female Body in African American Literature
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 February 2019) | Viewed by 52955
Special Issue Editor
Interests: African American literature and culture; African American visual studies; justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; womanist studies; inclusive leadership; black body; spirituality and religion
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Katherine Clay Bassard declares nearly twenty years ago in her formative text Spiritual Interrogations, that in order to more fully consider the ways black women have spiritually represented themselves in African American literature, one must consider a variety of religious traditions that shape their religious experiences including Christianity, Islam, African and neo-African traditional, among others. More importantly, this practice of reading black women’s intertextuality (what she terms spiritual interrogation) structures visions of reading that provide a richer understanding of the ways in which the sacred and secular, the spiritual and political, become a lens through which to see African American female subjectivity in all of its nuanced complexity.
This special issue seeks to explore the ways in which writers reclaim the black female body in African American literature using the theoretical, social, cultural, and religious frameworks of spirituality and religion. Of key importance to this collection is black women’s agency—acknowledged and affirmed in prose, poetry, essays, speeches, written plays, or short stories. Whether it is Indigo (Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo) creating a world with her dolls that shepherds her through her rite of passage to womanhood, or Baby Suggs declaring in her “fixing ceremonies” in the Clearing that “in this here place, we flesh,” (Beloved), authors have sought to discuss the tensions of the sacred and secular through concepts such as forgiveness, redemption, passion, alienation, motherhood, sex, marriage, among others.
Prof. Dr. Carol Henderson
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- spirituality
- Black/African theologies
- religions
- identity
- gender
- black body
- sacred
- secular
- race
- embodiment
- cultural affirmation
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