The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, "I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church." Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, "with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs and my equally compelling education in feminist theories that mean to liberate and empower women."
Faithful Transgressions examines a remarkable group of authors and their highly readable and entertaining books. In producing the first significant book-length study of Mormon women's autobiographical writing, Bush rides a wave of memoir publishing and academic interest in autobiography and other life narratives. As she elucidates these works in relation to the religious tradition that played a major role in shaping them, she not only positions them in relation to feminist theory and current work on women's life writings but ties them to the long literary tradition of spiritual autobiography.
How creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and feel through the artistic work of Black women
Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, ordinary women affiliated with the women's movement were responsible for a veritable explosion of periodicals, poetry, and manifestos, as well as performances designed to support "do-it-yourself" education and consciousness-raising. Kathryn Thoms Flannery discusses this outpouring and the group education, brainstorming, and creative activism it fostered as the manifestation of a feminist literacy quite separate from women's studies programs at universities or the large-scale political workings of second-wave feminism. Seeking to break down traditional barriers such as the dichotomies of writer/reader or student/teacher, these new works also forged polemical alternatives to the forms of argumentation traditionally used to silence women, creating a space for fresh voices. Feminist Literacies explores these truly radical feminist literary practices and pedagogies that flourished during a brief era of volatility and hope.
Footpaths and Bridges celebrates the vitality and diversity of Native American women, collecting plays ranging from ETHNOSTRESS—a humorous take on art and identity politics—to the biographical musical Te Ata to a retelling of the Thanksgiving story from the Wampanoag perspective. The dramatic works are accompanied by critical commentary that illuminates Native American women’s theater practices and perspectives, highlighting the issues of heritage, identity, and changing lifestyles that the plays imaginatively tackle.
Featuring work from a wide array of tribes and geographic regions, the collection affords the artist, scholar, and general reader access to previously unheard voices that communicate the complexity and the diversity of the Native American experience. The far-ranging genres and content of the plays suggest the many possibilities for communicating the past and the present, the personal and the political, and the stunning kaleidoscope of Native American life and art.
“Often thoughtful provocateurs, Native American playwrights are frequently overlooked . . . eminently readable, and possibly performable, the plays [in this collection] examine colonization, generational differences, ‘ethnostress,’ and cultural identity.”
—Choice
Laura Esther Wolfson’s literary debut draws on years of immersion in the Russian and French languages; struggles to gain a basic understanding of Judaism, its history, and her place in it; and her search for a form to hold the stories that emerge from what she has lived, observed, overheard, and misremembered.
In “Proust at Rush Hour,” when her lungs begin to collapse and fail, forcing her to give up an exciting and precarious existence as a globetrotting simultaneous interpreter, she seeks consolation by reading Proust in the original while commuting by subway to a desk job that requires no more than a minimal knowledge of French. In “For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors” she gives away her diaphragm and tubes of spermicidal jelly to a woman in the Soviet Union who, with two unwanted pregnancies behind her, needs them more than she does. “The Husband Method” has her translating a book on Russian obscenities and gulag slang during the dissolution of her marriage to the Russian-speaker who taught her much of what she knows about that language.
In prose spangled with pathos and dusted with humor, Wolfson transports us to Paris, the Republic of Georgia, upstate New York, the Upper West Side, and the corridors of the United Nations, telling stories that skewer, transform, and inspire.
The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child.
Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as “liberatory narratives.” These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the “safe” vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.
Sally Chivers provides a fascinating look at and challenge to how North American popular culture has portrayed old age as a time of disease, decline, and death. Within contemporary Canadian literary and film production, a tradition of articulate central elderly female characters challenges what the aging body has come to signify in a broader cultural context. Rather than seek positive images of aging, which can do their own prescriptive damage, the author focuses on constructive depictions that provide a basis on which to create new stories and readings of growing old. This type of humanities approach to the study of aging promises neither to fixate on nor avoid consideration of the role of the body in the much broader process of getting older. The progression implied in the title from the solitary symbol of The Old Woman toward a community of older women, indicates not a move toward euphemism, but rather an increasing and necessary awareness of the social and cultural dimensions of aging.
Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."
Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.
Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.
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