1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910785271703321

Autore

Bassard Katherine Clay

Titolo

Spiritual Interrogations : Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing / / Katherine Clay Bassard

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [1999]

©1999

ISBN

1-282-75344-4

9786612753442

1-4008-2259-9

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (194 p.)

Collana

Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History

Disciplina

810.9/382

Soggetti

African American women -- Intellectual life

African American women -- Religious life

African American women in literature

American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism

American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism

American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism

Christianity and literature -- United States

Community life in literature

Religion and literature -- United States

Spiritual life in literature

Spirituals (Songs) -- History and criticism

Wheatley, Phillis, 1753-1784 -- Religion

Women and literature -- United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One. The Daughters' Arrival: Histories, Theories, Vernaculars -- Chapter Two. Diaspora Subjectivity and Transatlantic Crossings: Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Recovery -- Chapter Three. "The Too Advent'rous Strain": Slavery, Conversion, and Poetic Empowerment in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies -- Chapter Four. "Social Piety" in Ann Plato's



Essays -- Chapter Five. "I Took a Text": Itinerancy, Community, and Intertextuality in Jarena Lee's Spiritual Narratives -- Chapter Six. Rituals of Desire: Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson -- Chapter Seven. Performing Community: Culture, Community, and African American Subjectivity before Emancipation -- Afterword. The Sacred Subject -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.