Katherine Clay Bassard's Books

Spiritual Interrogations

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

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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Spiritual Interrogations

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

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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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194

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400822599

ISBN 13

9781400822591

Transforming Scriptures

African American Women Writers and the Bible

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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Transforming Scriptures

African American Women Writers and the Bible

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the “great code” of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard discusses how such texts respond as a collective “literary witness” to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.

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Page Count

182

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082033880X

ISBN 13

9780820338804

Spiritual Interrogations

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

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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Spiritual Interrogations

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

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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194

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400822599

ISBN 13

9781400822591

Legba's Crossing

Narratology in the African Atlantic

By: Heather Russell,Katherine Clay Bassard

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Legba's Crossing

Narratology in the African Atlantic

By: Heather Russell,Katherine Clay Bassard

In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. InLegba’s Crossing, Heather Russell examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form. Russell’s in-depth analysis of the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman is framed in light of the West African aesthetic principle ofàshe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form.Àsheis linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. Russell argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls “the Legba Principle.”

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Page Count

218

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820336106

ISBN 13

9780820336107

Transforming Scriptures

African American Women Writers and the Bible

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

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Transforming Scriptures

African American Women Writers and the Bible

By: Katherine Clay Bassard

Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the "great code" of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective "literary witness" to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. Black women's historic encounters with the Bible were, indeed, transformational; in the process of "turning cursing into blessing" these women were both shaped and reshaped by the scriptures they appropriated for their own self-representation. Two important biblical figures emerge as key tropes around which women fashioned a counternarrative to the dominant culture's "curse" on black female identity: the "talking mule" from Numbers 22 and the "black but comely" Shulamite of Song of Songs, the Queen of Sheba. Transforming Scriptures analyzes these tropes within a range of contexts, from biblical justifications of slavery and the second-class status of women to hermeneutical and post-structural critiques of the Bible. African American women's appropriations of scripture occur within a continuum of African American Bible-reading practices and religious or ideological commitments, argues Bassard. There is thus no single "black women's hermeneutic"; rather, theories of African American women and the Bible must account for historical and social change and difference.

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178

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820336130

ISBN 13

9780820336138

Legba's Crossing

Narratology in the African Atlantic

By: Heather Russell,Katherine Clay Bassard

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Legba's Crossing

Narratology in the African Atlantic

By: Heather Russell,Katherine Clay Bassard

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

218

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820336106

ISBN 13

9780820336107

Book's by Katherine Clay Bassard

Spiritual Interrogations

Spiritual Interrogations

Transforming Scriptures

Transforming Scriptures

Spiritual Interrogations

Spiritual Interrogations

Legba's Crossing

Legba's Crossing

Transforming Scriptures

Transforming Scriptures

Legba's Crossing

Legba's Crossing

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