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

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Princeton University Press, Jan 18, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 192 pages

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.

 

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Common terms and phrases

Africa to America African Ameri African American culture African American literary African American subjectivity African American women's Alice Walker Ann Plato argue authorship Bakhtin black male black women writers Boston boundaries Brought From Africa chapter Christian Church context conversion critical death dialogic diaspora subjectivity discourse displacement early African American elegies enslaved Essays figure free black gender Henry Louis Gates Houston Baker Humez important intertextuality Jarena Lee Journal June Jordan Lady language Lee's lightning meaning Middle Passage narrative Negro nineteenth century notion Olaudah Equiano performance Phillis Wheatley Poems on Various poet poetic poetry preaching race racial Rebecca Cox Jackson refigure religion Religious Experience response revision ritual scene scholars sermon Shaker Shango signified Slave Narratives slave trade slavery social soul space speaking specific Speech Genres Spillers Spiritual Interrogations structure textual theorizing tion transatlantic utterance Various Subjects Religious vernacular visions Wheatley's woman written

About the author (1999)

Katherine Clay Bassard is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have been published in African American Review and Callaloo.

Bibliographic information

TitleSpiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing
Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
AuthorKatherine Clay Bassard
PublisherPrinceton University Press, 1999
ISBN1400822599, 9781400822591
Length192 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / American / African American & Black
  
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