African American Women Writers

The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.

A review of the digital theatre festival on the work of Adrienne Kennedy, understudied in relation to the American Black Arts Movement and aligned with the Theatre of the Absurd in the USA. Her work has been drastically underreprested on American stages.

This essay locates Saidiya Hartman’s travel and writing in relationship to a longer and multifaceted legacy of black travel that includes the coerced movement of black people across the Atlantic during the slave trade, the migratory travel of black diasporic peoples, and African American tourism to Africa, Ghana in particular. Moreover, this paper argues that Hartman's text challenges us to build bridges across the boundaries we often construct between these various types of movement, enabling us to see the tenuous ways in which these journeys intersect. Pushing beyond narrow definitions of travel, this essay questions singular frameworks that focus on a single type of journey, as they lead to incomplete readings of African American travel texts, like Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, that foreground a wide range of journeys—forced journeys of slavery, journeys of flight and displacement, as well as voluntary journeys of privilege. This study expands scholarship on Hartman by tending to the fluid and multiple geographies and itineraries at the center of her travel text, making visible the complexities of black people's journeys in the past and present and illustrating how those complex journeys produce varying perspectives on slavery and freedom.