African American Literature; Black Women's Writing

One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so he discovered an international audience.

While most antebellum narratives of self-liberated slaves detailed the narrator’s life in slavery, their escape, and the life they made in freedom, postbellum narratives of slaves liberated by constitutional amendment focused on the life in slavery and the preparation it provided for the life as successful free citizens.  Keckley’s autobiography is important because it is a blend of both of these.  As a woman born into slavery who purchased her own freedom (there was no dramatic escape) she made a successful post-slave life by enlisting the skills she learned in slavery to provide her with a  career as a free woman of color.

קריאה פוסט-מרקסיסטית בסיפור הקצר "שימוש יומיומי" מאת אליס ווקר. המאמר מציג שני עולמות מתחרים, הפועלים במקביל בתוך הסיפור וברמה הפואטית-חיצונית שלו: עולם קדם תעשייתי שעיקרון הייצוג המוביל שלו הוא הסיפור שבעל-פה (על פי המסה "מספר" מאת ולטר בנימין), ועולם פוסט-תעשייתי  רווי בייצוגי מדיה המאיים לבלוע את אותו עולם קדם תעשייתי אותנטי על ידי שכפולו. קונפליקט זה מגיע לנקודת משבר סביב פריט  מריבה המייצג עבור שני הסדרים, הקדם- והפוסט-מודרני, את המורשת הנשית השחורה  - שמיכת טלאים פרי מלאכתן של בנות המשפחה העומדת במרכז הסיפור. שמיכת הטלאים - דימוי תרבותי מרכזי וטעון בפוליטיקת הזהויות האמריקנית - מייצרת שוב את הקונפליקט המתרחש בסיפור ברמת התקבלותו הביקורתית, באופן המזהה את ביקורת הספרות האמריקנית האתנית כמשתייכת לאותו סדר פוסטמודרני מחפצן נגדו יוצאת ווקר.

"The author of this paper examines the symbolism of pollution in
various modes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart. He explains the symbolism of pollution as a
mythic form contained and apprehended in literature. The
interpretative procedure he uses is Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. As a
probing instrument, it draws upon similar serial structures from
these works exploring contrasts and aporias. Hermeneutics fits
most because of the valued qualities of authorial distanciation,
explication and readings derivable from majority of presences and
textual existents. Of these readings, the symbolism of pollution
grasped under the aspect of fear is the issue which exercises the
characters as they are tethered to activities which demean, abase
and humiliate them, and which appear in different shades. Dr
Chukwumah locates the root and figure of pollution in Joseph
Conrad’s Lord Jim from where he inaugurates and articulates every
other implicatory reading. Pollution impacts on the consciousness of the individuals, echoing the existential. Though it manifests through various characters, it takes different dimensions as the reading progresses, leaving behind echoes of what pollution could (not) mean and how it matters."

considerable body of critical work devoted to her writing, she remains surprisingly little known outside the specialist fields of African literature, and indeed even theatre. I will then seek to relate this assertion to her status as a woman writer in Africa, and to the challenges her conflation of traditional African cultural forms and Western dramaturgy create. Sutherland incorporates Greek theatre (Edufa overtly reworks Euripides' Alcestis) with African oral story telling, myths, folktales (The Marriage of Anasewa draws on Anasegoro, a Ghanaian dramatic form) and the printed word (the use of the bookshop in Foriwa) as the parts that give rise to a new culture, in a new Ghana.

The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.

This article analyzes two films by the twentieth-century filmmaker Bill Gunn, who wrote and directed STOP! (1970) and Ganja and Hess (1973). Both films are unique because they show the complicated, multidirectional power relations among erotic subjects without sexual exploitation as its aim. The phrase “let it go black” refers to Gunn’s approach to the erotic subject on film, which privileges multiple evocations that blackness can bring to sexuality. I also posit a dialectic between the radical spectator and filmmaker who together can transform cinematic relationships through a shared desire to expand our imaginative perspectives outside of the bounds of the Jezebel, the Buck, and other pervasive racialized sexual types circulated by Hollywood filmmakers of all races, nationally and globally.

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color is coming out from Nightboat Books on May 1, 2018, though I originally began editing this project about four years ago with Lambda Literary, as an online journal. The anthology covers 100 years of queer of color history, since the Harlem Renaissance. To celebrate the launch of this historic project, VIDA has provided the space for several of the queer women of color in the anthology to write odes for the other queer women of color who also appear in the anthology but are deceased. Below is an intergenerational literary dialogue, from one generation to the next, from the living poets to those who have passed. I hope you enjoy these conversations, these love letters, letters of appreciation, across time and space. — Christopher Soto

“Sisterhood is powerful,” as a rallying cry, masked the reality that the attainment of feminist sisterhood is a process, perhaps one that is never-ending.  As each of the Black feminists discussed remind us, Black feminist sisterhood, whether actual or of the imagination, can foster change; it can allow for an interchange of ideas and shared knowledge that can enhance and transform lives, and it can mean very necessary and encouraging community.  Black feminist sisterhood is a force in the world.  It has touched and transformed and elucidated my life, as well as the lives countless others. And it has done so primarily through writing.

An analysis on the impact of street literature on African American Women, their perception of themselves and society reflected in these stories, mainly written by other women with a similar background.
From the historical insight to the literary genre's characteristics, and the consequences these novels have on younger generations.

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie’s shamed self-consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie’s self-consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre’s theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie’s evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I’m here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie’s self-consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self-consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel’s emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.

Lo scopo di questo breve intervento è quello di introdurre la biografia della scrittrice americana Zora Neale Hurston, vissuta a cavallo tra la fine dell'Ottocento e la prima metà del Novecento (1891-1960), con particolare riferimento al suo romanzo più famoso, Their Eyes Were Watching God, dato alle stampe nel 1937.

I set out to explore colour symbolism in Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The bluest eye. There is a strong appearance of the colours orange, yellow, white and blue throughout the work that have symbolic connotations and effects which portrays an image of beauty.

To determine how Morrison uses colour symbolism effectively, I analyse the colours associated with seasons. In considering “Autumn and Winter” I investigate the colour white by evaluating its effect in showing purity and an established beauty ideal. This is portrayed by symbols like the Shirley Temple doll or cup, given to one of the characters, showing the invasion of mass media in social perceptions of beauty.
I also analysed the use of marigolds unable to bloom, to show the suppression of a particular sector of society considered to be inferior, due to their skin colour which contradicts the already established beauty image of whiteness and purity.

This will also be studied through Pecola’s love for yellow dandelions, indicating her idolization for white blonde girls, portraying how symbolically blind she is by the external standards of beauty.
I will also be focusing on Morrison’s main symbol which is included in her novel’s title, The bluest eye. I will analyse Pecola’s search to possess clear blue eyes to show how society managed to place in high regards white traits, excluding the representation of other races. This affects vulnerable characters like Pecola to believe they must possess said traits to earn society’s respect.

In the course of this analysis, I conclude that symbolism is used to challenge the beauty ideals present of that time that managed to isolate a race, qualifying them as undesirable individuals. Through this technique, Morrison successfully explores the theme of discrimination, creating a masterpiece considered a leading exponent of “Black Literature”.

In today’s society cancer has become a regular part of our everyday life. Yet, the movies and books on the subject mostly romanticize the disease and end with an acceptable tragedy. Real life is nothing like that. There is no romantic aspect to the minutes, hours, days, months, or years following the diagnosis. One of the hardest aspects of living with cancer is the change in how people interact with you. Once you tell someone about the cancer, every conversation becomes about the cancer. Maybe someday people will realize that when it comes to surviving and coping with cancer, no one has any idea what they are talking about. Except survivors, like my mother. She has been battling cancer off and on for the last 10 years. First it was uterine cancer in 2004, then kidney cancer in 2010, and now metastatic kidney cancer in the lungs, which she has been struggling with for the last year. Which I have been struggling with for the last year.

The use of Hurston’s essay by the Smithsonian Institution points to the exalted status that Hurston and her essay have now achieved. Once anthropologists began to take note of Hurston’s folklore collection Mules and Men certain adjustments were made in order to absorb Hurston’s writings into the discourse of anthropology. There has never been a systematic analysis of “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Hurston has been said to have been elusive. She is not at all elusive. The problem is that her readers are not equipped to read her work, because they have made a set of justifiable but nevertheless mistaken assumptions about what they are dealing with. Hurston’s essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression” is not anthropology, it is esotericism.  The other texts that Hurston wrote as anthropology—Mules and Men and Tell My Horse are likewise coded, esoteric, and are completely devoid of authenticity as anthropological studies or collections of folklore.

J M Coetzee’s novel, “Disgrace” (1999) that won him the Nobel Prize and the second Booker Prize in the Literature. Disgrace portrays the black-brighten picture of the South African society with a different note where the whites are the oppressed and marginalized section of the community, and “where the hunter became the hunted.” The novel presents not only the major thematic kaleidoscopic picture of the hostilities and brutalities which prevail between the whites and the blacks, but it details the following cultural, psychological and political situations also. After the new Constitution for South Africa was adopted in 1994; Disgrace also came under the debate in the parliament of South Africa. The African National Congress party was one of the most prominent anti-apartheid movements led by Nelson Mandela, who was the first post-apartheid elected president of SA in 1994. During the ruling, the party felt and also accepted that the novel Disgrace that presented an accurate pessimistic picture of South Africa in which the thematic focus reveals the race tool that shows poverty, crime, xenophobia, bloodshed, homosexuality, and as the emerged aspects in the Post-apartheid South Africa. The significant themes of the entire novel revolve around the protagonist David Lurie, "FOR A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well", who is an old Professor of English Communications at a technical university in Cape Town.
How to Cite-
Manoj Kumar Yadav, Meenakshi Sharma Yadav. (2020). Role of Major Themes in the Novel Disgrace by J M Coetzee: The Emerged Aspects of Society in the Post-Apartheid South Africa. International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology, 29(11s), 2681-2701.
Retrieved from http://sersc.org/journals/index.php/IJAST/article/view/22686

The African-American poetry of the 1930s represents a far different picture than has been chronicled. The tremendous energy that has gone into the construction of what is now institutionalized as the Harlem Renaissance has cast a deep shadow over the decade of the thirties—in effect subsuming the period of the Great Depression into the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time the personality cults that have arisen around the iconic personalizations of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown have also affected the assessment of the poetry of the thirties. It is difficult to locate the decade of the 1930s in critical studies. The impetus in effect by the commentators on that decade is that of reduction. The idea that the 1930s constitutes a period without African-American literary production became a dogma. African-American poets were not relegated to the production of poems cast in the folk forms. Far less acknowledged is the preponderance of the sonnet in the African-American poetry of the 1930s. After the 1960s, the valorization of the political over the aesthetic by critics is a determining factor in the assessment of the poetry of the 1930s. There is a large body of work published in magazines and anthologies that has not been taken into consideration.

This paper approaches the theme of human rights from the perspective of racism (social and political discrimination based on biological differences) and sexism (the discrimination of the woman based on the opinion that she is less able than the man).  Those were issues that engaged the greater attention of black writers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ralph Ellison.  From a survey of selected works by African-American writers of that period, the paper argues that the black population, while it hailed the structural racial reforms, was concerned that the legislative dismantling of segregative structures had not changed the fundamental discriminatory attitude of whites. It further shows that the black woman faced another kind of discrimination not only as a person of colour but also because of her gender; discrimination, sadly, even from her own black society.

The paper analyses the representation of the experiences of the black women as mothers in Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye. It is argued that the texts construct a representation of black motherhood as heterogenous and nuanced, and thus demonstrates the contribution of black literature to the black feminist objective of rewriting exclusive dominant discourses. The theoretical framework of intersectionality is employed, with the analysis of the representation framed in terms of the consideration of racial and gendered structures as functioning in tandem. The issues addressed in relation to motherhood include white-centric norms of womanhood and motherhood, dehumanization and racial self-hatred, and the heterogenous responses to and experiences of motherhood among black women.

Keywords: motherhood, race, gender, Black Feminism, Toni Morrison, African-American literature

UMI. ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest. Haiti re-membered: Exile, diaspora, and transnational imaginings in the writings of Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy. ...

Much work remains to be done, however, to explore how these autobiographers spoke against the institution of slavery using a framework of faith. The challenge of this scholarship is threefold: first, many of these women wrote only one or two texts because their main vehicle of communication was the sermon; second, in their writings they often include sparse biographical information, as they were more focused on conveying the stories of their spiritual lives; and finally, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find additional information about their lives. We are thus tested to reexamine our scholarly notions of a "body of work": How are we to understand this particular genre of religious stories as autobiography within the larger conversation about the institution of slavery? How might we explore the lives of these authors when their work seems to be the only remaining evidence?

This paper aims to address some of the most revealing aspects of four Black anthropologists' lives and work who are still unknown to the vast majority of Brazilian social scientists. In recent years, these intellectuals have been rediscovered mostly due to the initiatives led by Afro-Brazilian students engaged with the anti-racist agenda in higher education. From very different styles, methods, and practices, each of these Black anthropologists developed anti-racist projects that could spark significant changes in how social scientists think about their role within and outside the academic boundaries.

May 20-21, 2021.
Hosted by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities - Common Ground Consortium

As N.M Aston puts it, "the causes and circumstances leading to the age-old existence of oppression and despair of the lives of the marginalized class of nations" vast majority of people can be enumerated thus: 1. The self down-gradation of these people since ages, suppressing even the slightest protest against injustice that sought to find a voice 2. The conditions of abject poverty, unhealthy and unsanitary conditions in which these people had been sheltered, but they held a belief that they were accursed to live such lives 3. Even the minimum rights as human beings denied to them, rendering them incapable of seeing the light of freedom and comfortable living, thanks to the age-old ideology taught to them by the upper castes in India and the white race in other countries, that they were fated to be hewers of wood and drawers of water-mere slaves !" 1

A grade UC Riverside

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry voices gender; heteronormativity, masculine misogyny–violence, around the notion of class and race ; Males versus females. Blacks versus Whites. Her multiform autobiographical release invites us to read between the lines. Brooks is a surrogate, when she voices issues that her time unvoiced. A code of images has to be deciphered for these voiced matters to become universally understandable. Her depiction of life between 1945 through the seventies in Bronzeville, Chicago is passed through a sonore poetry, a poetry that sings mournful pleas and riotous ballads. Her work, Blacks, published in 1987 is a long song made of poems and prose pieces offered in different sections throughout about five hundred pages. Prolific writer, she invites the reader to consider this portrayal of life, somehow similar to Robert Lowell’s 1959 Life Studies, regardless of our gender, class and race, with songs-poems, that despite its numerous wounds, reconciles ourselves by becoming epic to empower the oppressed.

In her short story Everyday Use, the African American writer Alice Walker insists on describing her characters implicitly or explicitly by dressing them an animal epithet, which is labeling a character by associating with animal quality, in particular, the black female characters, Mrs. Johnson, and her two daughters: Maggie, and Dee. Beyond such an aesthetic technique, there is a hopeful impact on the reader, which she intends to make it come true. This area, which is the goal of the current paper, will be studied in terms of Walker's eco-perspectives and theory of Womanism. In this theory, she adeptly articulates different modes of oppression exerted against women. The question is that: Why does Walker portray female characters by comparing them to animals? Is it a servile comparison by her to satisfy a white readership or for what else? Now a coded message is found out: Walker, as womanist, animal activist, is defiant and ridiculous of the mainstream agent of humanism represented by white males. She aesthetically inverts the meaning of the negative, dehumanizing image devised and everyday used by the men of ruling class into aesthetic and positive one to represent the identity of black women. In her literary work, Walker creates a new meaning that identifies and celebrates black women as humanist, responsible, strong, able, independent, resistant and resilient beings.

This work aims to translate and analyze the translation process of three short stories of the book Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1991) entitled Leaving, Atini and Joyce of the author Sindiwe Magona. Beyond being a writer and a poet, she is a playwright, an actress, a storyteller, a Xhosa teacher, a translator, a dubber, and a motivational speaker. Her works present more than a social critic; it shows the evidence that African women also create their narratives and epistemologies, also make science in which take them out of a place of being mere object of study to be the agents of their own history. In this manner, it is from this point of view that this work has its specific objectives which are: make a poetic translation, in other words, a political and ethical translation recognizing the identity by the alterity; search for a translation based on the “letter”, on the text surface letting the otherness come into the language; see the translation rhythm as an arranger and meaning producer in the discourse; set relations between South Africa and Brazil, between black African women authors and Brazilians that make literary productions; and last, nourish the university with the production of black, Brazilians, Africans, Afro-Latin and other women authors.

On 28 th August 2013 a news report came out in the online edition of a newspaper 1 about the racially inappropriate figure of "Black Pete" who is seen to accompany St. Nikolaus in the Dutch celebration of Christmas. The piece is curiously titled as "Black Pete: Tradition or Throwback to Slavery?" This points to the fact that the whole thing is being seen through the white gaze of the European, for whom supposedly slavery and tradition are distinct. It is an attempt to exorcise slavery from the white tradition to forget the horrors it brought for another race. But for a black writer, the tradition is rooted in the violence of the slavery era, in the narratives the subsequent generations heard from their parents or grandparents which became a part of the narrative they were creating themselves and giving a voice to erstwhile silenced attempts at self expression-ones that were not paid any heed to. Here, as I attempt to delineate Tony Morrison and her treatment of tradition in her novels, (especially The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby and Beloved) and her non-fictional writings, I will take into consideration memory, parent-child relationships, Names and her overall use of history and myths in consolidating her tradition in her writings and try to show how important a role the idea of tradition itself plays in these novels. As a parallel I would use a set of essays by Alice Walker and the novel "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko to show through walker that the importance of tradition in the black context finds resonance in other chief writers too (almost all black writers, but I choose Walker as a fellow female compatriot of Morrison) and through Silko's Native Indian narrative that in cultures other than the blacks which have been marginalised by the whites in the US, the path of resistance is to hold on to one's own traditions. For Morrison, tradition is the source of inspiration, and she moves above just her own racial past and goes on to identify with the Greeks as a source of inspiration and with whom the black art has lots in common.

Resumo Este artigo pretende apresentar uma análise panorâmica da escrita de mulheres negras dos E.U.A. e do Brasil, examinando como estes escritos estabelecem uma relação dialógica entre si no espaço diaspórico das Américas. A partir das considerações acerca da diáspora feitas por Brent Edwards (2003), argumentarei que as escritoras contemporâneas Afro-Brasileiras e Afro-Estadunidenses re-escrevem o corpo da mulher negra segundo representações literárias multi-facetadas nas interseções dos discursos de raça, gênero, e sexualidade. Lidos lado a lado, seus projetos literários contribuem para a reelaboração de idéias universalizantes sobre o " eu " e as complexidades da subjetividade em relação ao sujeito feminino negro, ao mesmo tempo em que retêm suas especifi cidades históricas e culturais. Através de um olhar comparativo e trasnacional, este artigo debruça-se sobre algumas das obras literárias de escritoras como Conceição Evaristo, Miriam Alves, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Cristiane Sobral, e Elisa Lucinda (Brasil); e também, Abstract This essay aims at delineating a panoramic analysis of contemporary black women's writings in the U.S. and Brazil in order to examine how these writings establish a dialogic relationship with each other across the diasporic space in the Americas. Taking on Brent Edwards conceptualizations of diaspora (2003), I will argue that contemporary Afro-Brazilian and U.S. Afro-American women writers rewrite the black female body into literary representations of multi-layered racial, gender and sexual discourses. Read against and with each other, their writings contribute to re-elaborate universalizing notions of selfhood and the complexities of subjectivity, while retaining a sense of cultural and historical specifi city. Within a comparative and transnational approach, this essay will discuss some of the writings by Conceição Evaristo, Miriam Alves, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Cristiane Sobral, and Elisa Lucinda (Brazil); as well as some of the works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Danzy Senna (U.S.), among others.

Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black

Vicky Chaparyan
Lebanese University

Abstract
Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community.  As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of self-determination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language.  Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about  her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through comparing the Maternity symbolic order in Morrison to the Paternity symbolic order in Jacque Lacan’s The Psychoses (1955-1956). 

Key words: Beloved, slavery, Maternity symbolic order, Paternity symbolic order, J. Lacan, unspeakable thoughts, language, ghost, story of trauma.

In this special issue of Taboo, the authors use Beyoncé's album, Lemonade, to introduce the concept of the Bad Bitch Barbie, a term used to identify a woman who embraces her body while simultaneously using it as a commodity. Representing a Black body ideal in Lemonade, Beyoncé uses images of Black women's bodies to express empowerment, boldness, and resilience as Black women struggle to live in a racist and sexist society. There has been recent interest in the ways Black women have been portrayed in current media and popular culture, and many individuals have taken the opportunity to honor Black women's beauty, power, and resilience in the era of #BlackGirlMagic by paying homage to women who use music, sound, and the arts to tell their stories (Wilson, 2016; also see Jessica Care Moore's website, " Black Women Rock " [http://www.blackwomenrock.com]). In this article, our aim is twofold: first, we offer a historical review of the ways Black women and their bodies have been portrayed in music as well as in the political, cultural, and social spaces associated with Black women's worldviews. Second, we review songs from Lemonade to describe the Bad Bitch Barbie, who welcomes glamorization and embraces the profitability associated with the racialization, sexualization, and subjugation of Black women's bodies. This information is vital in discussions about how young African American girls emulate the likes of Beyoncé, and represent themselves in a mainstream culture whose beliefs are informed by socio-historical experiences concerning sexual imagery. The Bad Bitch Barbie figure recognizes—and, to some

Academic institutions in the global North have historically claimed leadership in the production of high-quality scholarship. As such, it is their work that often informs pedagogical materials in secondary and tertiary education worldwide. This dominance has serious cultural impacts. At the very least, it positions Western academics as 'custodians' of knowledge with the ability to influence what is taught and how it is taught. Within this framework, learning is politicised, and the teaching of subjects such as history, becomes a space of contention. These issues touch on the aim of the Southern Responses to Displacement from Syria (SRD) project, financed by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 715582) and led by Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh in the Migration Research Unit at University College London. In particular, it aligns with the project's goal to explore a multi-directional approach to knowledge production and to centralise the experience of displaced peoples and actors from the global South in scholarship. The Research Associate Dr Estella Carpi discussed slavery as an ignored form of forced migration with Dr Portia Owusu, Assistant Professor of English Literature at Texas A&M. The SRD team's conversation with Dr Owusu, indeed, endeavours to rethink mainstream forced migration studies and rather engages with neglected-and, at times, silenced-epistemologies of forced migration.

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sherley Ann Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange’s trope of the “methaphysical dilemma” to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers’ textual representations of black women’s bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as “primitive” or “unbridled” (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some of the artistic/literary strategies contemporary black women writers use to re-claim the power of voice/voicing as they depict black women’s subjectivities as unfinished, complex, but self-fashioned creations.

Si j'ai choisi ce titre, c'est parce que, dans la disjonction entre « black » et « blue », c'est toute la problématique de la voix noire dans la contre-culture qui se joue. Chant de la tristesse, mais aussi, de la résilience, le blues est au coeur de l'héritage noir, et de la littérature noire depuis la Harlem Renaissance : célébré, critiqué, repris, réinventé. Si le poète Leroi Jones -qui, en 1963, a publié une magnifique étude du blues, Blues People -rompt avec l'esthétique du blues en 1965, et, dans un geste fondateur, définit la « black aesthetic » qui sera sur le plan littéraire ce qu'est le Black Power sur le plan politique, la majorité des femmes noires qui commencent à écrire pendant les années 70 (y compris celles qui deviendront célèbres dans les décennies suivantes, comme Toni Morrison) reviennent au blues, dans lequel elles voient une affirmation de la résilience non seulement du peuple afroaméricain, mais des femmes noires plus spécifiquement. Pour les auteures qui se définissent comme noires et comme féministes, de Toni Cade Bambara à Ntozake Shange, il s'agit d'affirmer politiquement et esthétiquement la voix des femmes noires, entre dénonciation des violences subies et affirmation de la résilience, entre hommage aux formes lyriques de l'héritage afro-américain et formes nouvelles, dans des oeuvres qui brouillent toute distinction entre « highbrow » et « lowbrow », dialectal 1 et écrit, récit et poésie, récit et théâtre. Il n'y a évidemment pas une voix de femme noire -tous les registres, tous les tons se côtoient : la particularité des années 70 étant sans doute la manière dont dans une même oeuvre (poème, pièce de théâtre, nouvelle, roman) l'on entend ces voix multiples, et la manière dont l'on passe du plus intime au plus militant, dans une incarnation du slogan féministe the personal is political. J'espère montrer comment, entre colère et tendresse, douleur et humour, écriture à la marge et questionnement de la norme, ces voix noires arrivent à transformer à la fois la culture mainstream et la contreculture elle-même -et comment ces voix de femmes expriment le désespoir, mais aussi l'énergie de la lutte, et désir de changement radical, entre oppression présente et utopie désirée, sur fond performatif de l'affirmation black is beautiful.

All over the world now a days people are discussing the problems of marginalized groups -their social, ethnic, economic and cultural problems. Marginality with all aspects is indeed a major problem to be reckoned with in the world. By and large, most of the marginalized groups constitute minorities-religious, ethnic, linguistic or otherwise-in different countries. They have sub-cultures in this main stream cultures or religions. Invariably they are impoverished people constituting of minority groups . they suffer from economic, social or political impoverishment and find themselves estranged from this main stream. Their marginality may vary in its degrees , extent or intensity. Most countries and cultures have empowered groups at one pole and impoverished groups at the other and between the two, the people having graded power and poverty. The empowered people enjoy greater degree of freedom, social status and security of life. The impoverished people are not free form fear, insecurity and injustice. The form and nature of marginality depends upon the degree of impoverishment-economic, social or cultural. Marginality based upon caste, creed, religion or race is a kind of disability or affliction. Inequality is the main source of marginality, as it gives insecurity, injustice and exploitation. Marginalized sections of society are generally beyond the pale of dominant culture.

Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about--or witnessing--trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, READING TESTIMONY treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women to articulate a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The text places original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with African American literature to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in African American literature. The volume also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively.

Professor LaDonna L. Forsgren, has written a book that covers some extraordinary Black Women of theatre, who wrote, directed and produced theatre through the lens of the Black Arts Movement. These womanist/feminist, Martie Evans-Charles, Barbara Ann Teer, Sonia Sanchez and J.e. Franklin, paved the way for many if not all the black female playwrights of today. This book review gives a small window into what Professor Forsgren extensively shares in her book regarding the contributions of these four dynamic, powerful and historic women of color.

Internationally renowned poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine will read excerpts from her 2014 national book award finalist Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen has been described by The New Yorker as a "book that explores the kinds of injustice that thrive when the illusion of justice is perfected", and by the LA Review of Books as a "citizen’s exploration of racial subjectivity [that] traverses the philosophical (...) as it mines the terrain of national news and contemporary events". The New York Times has described the book as "timely", "in light of the national demonstrations over the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases". This book, in short, explores the public and private aspects of being a black American citizen today. The author’s books will be available for purchase, and she will do a book signing immediately following the reading.