LEADER 04303nam 22004695 450 001 9910404066903321 005 20200406050111.0 010 $a83-956095-5-8 024 7 $a10.1515/9788395609558 035 $a(CKB)4100000010138455 035 $a(DE-B1597)544704 035 $a(OCoLC)1138546082 035 $a(DE-B1597)9788395609558 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC6637327 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL6637327 035 $a(OCoLC)1272998173 035 $a(EXLCZ)994100000010138455 100 $a20200406h20192019 fg 101 0 $aeng 135 $aur||||||||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 10$aCulture-bearing Women $eThe Black Women Renaissance and Cultural Nationalism /$fIzabella Penier 210 1$aWarsaw ;$aBerlin : $cDe Gruyter Open Poland, $d[2019] 210 4$dİ2019 215 $a1 online resource (220 p.) 311 $a83-956095-4-X 327 $tFrontmatter -- $tContents -- $tPreface -- $t1 Introduction: The Black Women Renaissance, Matrilineal Romances and the "Volkish Tradition" -- $t2 Mapping the Black Women's Renaissance: The Formative 1970s and the Shift from a Black Nationalist to a Black Womanist Aesthetic -- $t3 Matrifocal Nationalism, Afrocentric Womanism and the Fear of Disinheritance -- $t4 Kulturnation: The Black Women's Renaissance, Folk Heritage and the Essential Black Female Matrix -- $t5 Volknation: The Black Holocaust and the Poetics of the Slave Sublime -- $t6 Culturalism, Classism, and the Politics of Redistribution -- $tBibliography -- $tIndex 330 $aThis study examines the Black Women's Renaissance (BWR) - the flowering of literary talent among African American women at the end of the 20th century. It focuses on the historical and heritage novels of the 1980s and the vexed relationship between black cultural nationalism and black feminism. It argues that when the nation seemingly fell out of fashion, black women writers sought to re-create what Renan called "a soul, a spiritual principle" for their ethnic group. BWR narratives, especially those associated with womanism, appreciated "culture bearing" mothers as cultural reproducers of the nation and transmitters of its values. In this way, the writers of the BWR gave rise to "matrifocal" cultural nationalism that superseded masculine cultural nationalism of the previous decade and made black women, instead of black men, principal agents/carriers of national identity. This monograph argues that even though matrifocal nationalism empowered women, ultimately it was a flawed project. It promoted gender and cultural essentialism, i.e. it glorified black motherhood and mother-daughter bonding and condemned other, more radical models of black female subjectivity. Moreover, the BWR, vivified by middle-class and educated black women, turned readers' attention from more contentious social issues, such as class mobility or wealth redistribution. The monograph compares the cultural nationalist novels of the 1980s with social protest novels written by the same authors in the 1970s and explains the rationale behind the change in their aesthetic and political agenda. It also contrasts novels written by womanist writers (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor to name just a few) and by African Caribbean immigrant or second-generation writers (Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff) to show that, on the score of cultural nationalism, the BWR was not a monolithic phenomenon. African American and African Caribbean women writers collectively contributed to the flourishing of the BWR, but they did not share the same ideas on black identities, histories, or the question of ethnonational belonging. 606 $aBlack Women Renaissance, Black Nationalism, Womanism 606 $aLITERARY COLLECTIONS / General$2bisacsh 610 $aBlack Women Renaissance, Black Nationalism, Womanism. 615 4$aBlack Women Renaissance, Black Nationalism, Womanism. 615 7$aLITERARY COLLECTIONS / General. 700 $aPenier$b Izabella, $4aut$4http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut$0891203 801 0$bDE-B1597 801 1$bDE-B1597 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910404066903321 996 $aCulture-bearing Women$92238940 997 $aUNINA