Womanism

Teaching the research paper has been considered a “present controversy” for over fifty years (Saalbach, 1963). Some scholars believe that it prepares students for “generalized academic writing” (Reiff and Bawarshi, 2011; Sutton, 1997; Schwegeler and Shamoon, 1982). However, others have referred to the research paper as a “fossilized,” “pseudo-academic,” “mutt genre” (Nowacek, 2011; Wardle, 2007; Carroll, 1999; Larsen, 1982). This chapter argues that radical openness and information overload--two major features of new media composing environments--compromise the relevance of the traditional research paper. First, the research paper has been praised and blamed for its (in)ability to help students learn the importance of writing from sources (Brent 2013, Rooney 2000). However, the parameters of most research assignments are incapable of matching the scale of data available at any given time. For instance, typical constraints like “use 5-7 sources” for a first-year college writing course seems ridiculous when it takes seconds to retrieve thousands, if not millions, of possible sources. Next, open-access publishing and collaborative authorship have transformed the way that research is conducted and recognized across disciplines. Although teaching students how to crowdsource research makes the most sense in a data deluge, the research paper privileges single authorship. Moreover, the problems of authorship and source attribution implicate the research paper in certain kinds of fraud. For instance, plagiarism and term paper mills are a “built-in” problem of research papers (Howell, 1977).  In sum, this chapter focuses on what the term "research" means in a context of too much information.  It concludes by offering a brief discussion of literature relevant to this topic.

Home / Phụ nữ mang thai / Bà bầu nên và không nên ăn gì, chế độ dinh dưỡng cho bà bầu 3 tháng đầu Bà bầu nên và không nên ăn gì, chế độ dinh dưỡng cho bà bầu 3 tháng đầu  December 4, 2015  Phụ nữ mang thai  25 Views Mang thai là thời kỳ vô cùng quan trọng và thiêng liêng đối với mỗi phụ nữ vì thế chế độ dinh dưỡng cho bà bầu lại càng cần được quan tâm. Khi mang thai lần đầu hầu hết tất cả các mẹ bầu đều có câu hỏi chung là Bà bầu nên và không nên ăn gì, chế độ dinh dưỡng cho bà bầu 3 tháng đầu, các tháng sau đó. Điều đó không có gì là lạ cả vì khi mang bầu sinh lý của mẹ sẽ thay đổi rất nhiều, có nhiều thực phẩm cần phải bồ sung cho sự phát triển của bé những cũng cần hạn chế những thực phẩm không tốt. Hãy cùng Mẹo Vặt Cuộc Sống tìm hiểu điều này nhé. Bà bầu nên ăn gì khi mang thai? Hãy cùng điểm danh một số loại thực phẩm không thể thiếu trong chế độ dinh dưỡng cho bà bầu hàng ngày nhé. – Sữa và các thực phẩm từ sữa: Trong sữa có chứa rất nhiều dưỡng chất cần thiết cho mẹ cũng như bé vì vậy bà bầu nên sử dụng hàng ngày. Sữa tươi tiệt trùng, sữa chua, sữa bà bầu là các loại mẹ nên cho vào danh sách ngay nhé, vì trong sữa có chứa nhiều canxi và protein tốt cho sự phát triển cả bé. Sữa và các thực phẩm từ sữa – Các loại đậu: Trong các loại hạt đậu chứa rất nhiều protein và chất xơ cần thiết, ngoài ra đậu còn chứa nhiều sắt, folate, canxi và kẽm Món ngon: Cháo bí ngô converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities. It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topics. Questions raised throughout the text focus readers on relevant contemporary issues and encourage critical reflection and dialogue between student-teachers and teacher-students.

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.

Alice Walker Annelerimizin Bahcesinin Arayisinda (1983) adli eserinde acikladigi kadincilik teorisiyle siyah feminizme yeni bir boyut getirmistir. Amaci; irk, toplumsal cinsiyet ve etnik farkliliklara bakmaksizin mucadelesini dunyadaki tum insanlari kapsayarak evrensellige erismektir. Bunun icin, Walker’a gore, insanlarin tarihini, ana soyunu ve onlara mucadele etmeleri icin ilham veren siyahi ve siyahi olmayan yazarlarin eserlerini kabullenip bilmesi gerekir. Walker, Kadinin Hasi Kolay Ezilmez (1981) baslikli eserindeki “Elethia” ve “Ilkbahar’da Eve Ani Yolculuk” baslikli iki oykusunde kadinci anlayisini temsil etmektedir. Walker’in kadin sorunsalina iliskin evrimlesen durusunu yansittigi icin adi gecen oykuler calismada incelenmektedir. “Elethia” ’nin baslik karakteri ve “Ilkbahar’da Eve Ani Yolculuk” oykusundeki Sarah sorunlariyla yuzlesir ve onlarla nasil savasabilecegini anlar. Boylece, calisma, Walker’in secilen oykulerini inceleyerek, yazarin Elethia ve Sarah adli karakterler...

At the time [I wrote] this essay, I [was] completing a dissertation chapter that focuses on the " I Am… " t-shirts popularized over the past two decades. In the process I [was] forced to contend with the verbal and grammatical limitations of remembrance. This [absence of t-shirts focusing on black womxn] mirrors how women's issues are relegated to an afterthought in not only broad ranging political engagement, but also academic scholarship. [This essay formed the foundation of another dissertation chapter, "A Calling of Names", which focused on t-shirts that featured black women and black LBGT victims of police violence.]

Both chapters are part of my book manuscript in progress, COTTON FRAMED REVOLUTIONARIES: T-SHIRT CULTURE AND THE BLACK PROTEST TRADITION.

Citations:
1. McNair, Kimberly L. “G-d Bless the Dead: A Calling of Names,” The Diaspora Newsletter, a special collection: INSURGENCY: The Black Matter(s) Issue, Fall 2014 – Winter 2015 Edition, December 2014. Print & Web.
2. McNair, Kimberly L. "Cotton Framed Revolutionaries: T-Shirt Culture and the Black Protest Tradition.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2017. ProQuest.

Although the 2017 revival of the #MeToo campaign has received mass media praise, it’s direct contribution to the current social shift fighting for social and political justice has yet to be empirically documented. Did this campaign provide temporary catharsis further inhibiting enactment within the social and political spheres? Understandings of social media campaigns’ role in social action is still limited in the literature. Using Bowers, Ochs, & Jensen (1971) explanations of rhetoric of agitation and control, I analyze news and social media accounts of the #MeToo campaign activity and the possible unfolding of social actions or inactions, including planned and forthcoming public events or campaigns over the next few months. This paper will place #MeToo within the context of feminism rhetoric and socio-political change. This analysis contributes to our understanding of social media’s role in political action and the position of feminist discourse within the public rhetoric to end sexual abuse, assault, and exploitation.

In this paper, I interrogate Christian interpretations of punishment through atonement theories from the early church in the West and turn to the Eastern concept of theosis as a possible correction to retributive punitive philosophies. This larger discussion frames a narrower conversation on the continuities and discontinuities of systems of sacrifice from slavery to our modern prison industrial complex. More trenchantly, I examine the relationship between the cross and carcerality through Jesus' proximity to criminality. I argue that by entering into history through a criminalized body, Jesus' life, ministry and death demonstrates his proximity to and solidarity with those who are criminalized - including the first Christian community who had a 'criminal element,' Jesus' ministerial purpose to "set the captives free," his instructions for discipleship to visit the 'least of these' who are imprisoned, to extending reconciliation to a 'penitent thief' and being surveilled and persecuted by a State sanctioned execution. In the end, by tracing a kind of christological three-day event of criminality, I argue that Jesus died a criminal but did not wake up one. On the cross Jesus transcends criminality through the resurrection, which gives hope for liberation over and against carceral systems of sacrifice.

What differentiates the work of this essay from previous critical work on Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road, namely the astute analyses by Cheryl Wall, Susan Willis, Valerie Boyd, and Lillie Howard, is my focus on Hurston’s interfamilial and friendship relations as read through the lens of Alice Walker’s definition of womanism. My application of Alice Walker’s womanist concept to Zora Neale Hurston showcases the ways in which Hurston embodies and perhaps serves as a creative influence for Walker’s definition of womanist. I explore Hurston as a womanist in the context of her relationship with her mother, Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, and her father, John Cornelius Hurston, as well as in the context of her friendships with Big Sweet, a woman Hurston meets and befriends while collecting folklore in 1928, and with the famous blues singer/stage performer, Ethel Waters, whose
friendship Hurston sought and won in the 1930s.

One of the places where there is an assumed manifestation of the Beloved Community is the Black church. However, church hurt is a phenomenon that has plagued the Black community. Marginalization, isolation, and even the adoption of a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude have been inferred habits and practices for Black congregants whose sexual lifestyle, mental stability, or sexual or emotional trauma may not fit neatly into the church doctrine. The inability to fit neatly within the doctrinal norms leaves many members of the Black community feeling abandoned spiritually and in a desperate search for belonging and acceptance. Using Black liberation theology, womanist thought, autoethnography, and Afrocentricity as a metatheory, this article seeks to discuss the impact of liberationist ideology and womanist ethics within the practices of an Afrocentric rite of passage community based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a satellite branch in New York, New York.

The fragmentation of black humanity by colonialism and apartheid to the 21st century,
borders on the location of blacks in a white society and their constant claim to racial
authenticity. The ontological negation of black bodies as subjects of being suggests that blackness is an antithesis for humanity, and to be black in a racist world is a jeopardy. The fragments can also be traced on how Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) has responded to the constructs of race and class, while apparently overlooking the detriment of patriarchy as an equal challenge to black people themselves. The article looks at the fragmented black humanity from a womanist perspective by problematising a black man as a construct, a product of capitalism with a black woman as evidence of the tendency of patriarchal violence to elude BTL and a black home being a site of struggle. By looking at a fragmented black home as context which gave rise to an era of Black Consciousness (BC), in an attempt to fix the degradation of black humanity which was harnessed by BTL, we are decentring from the Western traditional forms of theology, epistemology and life which are anti-thesis to black humanity.

Course Description: This course is designed to familiarize students with the various philosophical perspectives African descended people throughout the Diaspora have offered for dealing with white supremacy, colonialism, and the modern construction of race. Instead of focusing primarily on "critical theories of race," this course is designed to give students the historical background in the thinkers that have laid the foundations of contemporary race theories. Unlike traditional race theory, which focuses on improving race relations through American Democratic Liberalism, these thinkers oppose the notion of "America," American democracy, and the success of the Civil Rights Movement.

Womanist Sass and Talk Back is a contextual resistance text for readers interested in social (in)justice. Smith raises our consciousness about pressing contemporary social (in)justice issues that impact communities of color and the larger society. Systemic or structural oppression and injustices, police profiling and brutality, oppressive pedagogy, and gendered violence are placed in dialogue with sacred (con)texts. This book provides fresh intersectional readings of sacred (con)texts that are accessible to both scholars and nonscholars. Womanist Sass and Talk Back is for readers interested in critical interpretations of sacred (con)texts (ancient and contemporary) and in propagating the justice and love of God while engaging those (con)texts.
Available at https://wipfandstock.com/catalog/product/view/id/16777/s/womanist-sass-and-talk-back/category/2/#.WmvJXScJADI.facebook  ;

And at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Womanist-Sass-Talk-Back-Intersectionality/dp/1498288863/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1517868918&sr=8-3&keywords=mitzi+j+smith

Feminarios, es la compilación de parte del material de clases, cursos,
seminarios y charlas realizadas por Julieta Kirkwood y que corresponden a la labor docente que ella efectuó durante cuatro años (desde 1981 a 1984) en distintos espacios y a diversas audiencias.
Su propio orden, la metodología que seguía fue una ayuda inmensa
para nuestra tarea de recopilación. Julieta escribía pacientemente
sus exposiciones orales, no en vano ella expresa al dar cuenta al antiguo
Círculo de Estudios de la Mujer de su trabajo: “¡Por cada una hora
de clases invierto ocho horas en la preparación!” Y es precisamente
esa dedicación la que ha hecho posible reunir los principales temas
abordados en su gesto de difusión pedagógica del feminismo.
Para editar este Feminarios, hemos dividido los manuscritos de
sus clases en tres grandes problemáticas: Sexo-Género; Feminismo
y Rebeldía; Mujer e Historia; añadimos una cuarta parte, Docencia
Feminista por las interesantes ideas que allí se vierten sobre la
generación de un programa y una pedagogía feminista en nuestro
país. La opción por este orden se debe a que en distintas épocas y
tipos de exposición, los problemas tratados eran —algunas veces—
recurrentes o retomados en otras dimensiones. Por ello, conjuntamos
los tópicos que coincidían y así llegamos a los temas que hoy
proponemos.
Muy poco se ha añadido o restado a los originales, con leves correcciones de estilo, engarzamientos de frases u oraciones realizamos nuestro trabajo de reescritura. Mantuvimos la sintaxis casi en su integridad para que la voz de Julieta pudiera ser oída por las(los)
lectoras(es) y se restituyera la fuerza de sus palabras.

Identity by itself is a complicated point, but it would be more complicated when restricted by issues such as race, gender, and class. Alice Walker, an African American writer, has mostly focused on the oppressions against black women in her works. She believes that black women should be treated as equal to white people. According to Alice Walker’s womanism, women should stick together to reject patriarchy and achieve self-recognition, self-value, and self-esteem. Womanists believe that women can recognize their identity through helping each other. In this novel, Celie and Shug are the examples for this term. Shug helps Celie identify herself first as a creature, second as a human being, and at last as a black female, which is the most remarkable. “The Color Purple,” an epistolary novel, is narrated by Celie. Most of her letters, which are all about her miseries, are addressed to God. By writing letters, Celie begins a way which leads her to recognize her identity. In this essay, the researcher attempts to show the interrelationships of gender, race, class, and their importance in the process of self-recognition in the novel.

This article identifies a discursive politics of legitimate origins in the narratives of nineteenth-century spiritual autobiographers, Zilpha Elaw and Old Elizabeth Drawing upon the work of political theorists Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Robin Kelley, and Jacqueline Mattis, I argue that the narratives and speech contained in them constitute political discourse As agents struggling against constraints placed upon them by socio-political networks, Zilpha and Elizabeth negotiated power relations with their voices and their pens They named, defined, and legitimized their experiences as Black women called to preach Nineteenth-century Black preaching women interpreted Pauline biblical texts in light of their own divine revelatory experiences Rather than reject Pauline Scriptures used to oppress and restrict their activities, these preaching women extracted images and language from the apostle Paul's call narratives Paul's Damascus Road experience and his discursive construction of origins assisted Black women in constructing and articulating their own politics of origins

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

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.

En este artículo se lleva a cabo el estudio sobre los beaterios como formas de religiosidad femenina durante la Edad Media y el papel jugado como la institución que antecedió a los conventos fundados durante la Edad Moderna. Para ello, se procede al análisis de los beaterios por su papel en el nacimiento de la vida conventual femenina vasca, junto con sus características y su implantación en la sociedad vasca de la época.

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.

Black Feminist and Womanist theories are culturally based perspectives that take into consideration the contextual and interactive effects of herstory culture, race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression. These frameworks provide a contextualized understanding of African American girls' experiences and perspectives. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the current status of research about African American girls. In addition, this article demonstrates the need for a theoretical perspective that can be used to produce research that accurately examines the lives of African American girls. Major themes of Black Feminist Thought and Womanism will serve as a viable theoretical framework for studying this population. Last, principles of a Black Feminist-Womanist research model will be defined.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar de que forma a imagem da mulher é utilizada no papel de assistentes de palco, também nas funções de dançarinas ou bailarinas, nos programas de auditório da TV brasileira, buscando traçar um paralelo com a imagem do sexo feminino formada em uma sociedade machista e patriarcal e aprofundar a discussão sobre o sexismo presente na mídia, explorando a objetificação e a inferiorização da mulher. Para tornar possível tal análise, quatro programas de auditório foram selecionados: “Cassino do Chacrinha”, “Domingo Legal”, “Pânico na TV” e “Caldeirão do Huck” e suas respectivas dançarinas. Neles, foram avaliados a papel das assistentes de palco no programa e suas roupas e exposição dos seus corpos, e, assim, buscando as relações e diferenças em suas origens com o cancã e o teatro de revista nascidos em Paris, que também influenciou a textualidade do rádio brasileiro, presentes até hoje nos programas de auditório da TV.

The purpose of this research is to explore the applicability of a womanist narrative medicine. The research builds upon the work of Rita Charon. It argues that the close reading of Meridian informs medical students of the epistemological privileges of the oppressed. The research poses the following questions. What are the parameters of a womanist narrative medicine? What is peculiar about the structure and content of Alice Walker’s novel Meridian and its importance in the training of medical professionals? It concludes by arguing that the rigorous study of Meridian can encourage culturally competent, compassionate, and attentive care.

Lauryn Hill was twenty-three years old when her 1998 solo debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, burst upon the global music market and swiftly became one of the most acclaimed and popular hip hop albums in history. Heralded by a hip hop beat, crooning love songs and rally cries, beaming black pride, and clamoring womanist wisdom, Hill scaled the treacherous summit of global pop stardom and was hailed as genius and prophetess. However, within four years Hill fell from the favor of much of the mainstream market. To have many pundits tell it, she veered across the thin line that supposedly separates genius from madness and prophecy from lunacy. This essay explores how various publics and pundits impute madness to Lauryn Hill and--most centrally--how Hill herself produces, mobilizes, and brandishes madness for radical art-making and self-making. Toward these aims, I closely examine her 2002 Unplugged 2.0 live album, as well as other performances, interviews, and media accounts. Her voice tuned to a mad pitch, Hill speaks truth to power and issues a sound that sometimes booms, sometimes sputters. Ultimately, this meditation upon Hill's life and work yields rich insights on black womanhood, performance, protest, and madness in American popular culture and beyond.

While it cannot be denied that the 16th-century Reformation, which challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian moral practice in a just manner, indeed came with deep and lasting political changes, it remained a male dominated
discourse. The Reformation was arguably patriarchal and points to a patriarchal culture of subordination and oppression of women that prevailed then and is still pertinent in the church and all spheres of society today. The absence of Elmina and the silenced yet loud
voices and cries from the female dungeons below a Dutch Reformed Church in the upper levels of the castle in the retelling of the narrative of the Reformation leaves much to be desired and has a bearing on how black women perceive the Reformation 500 years later. The article thus problematises the Reformation through the heuristic eyes of Elmina Castle in Ghana as the genesis of the ‘dungeoning’ of black women justified by faith. The article argues that black women are reformers from the dungeons following the historical experience of reformation and the Reformed faith as racist and sexist, among other ills  experienced by blacks in the Global South, with black women literally kept in the dungeons below a Reformed Church building as they were in Elmina with a biblical inscription, Psalm 138, on the threshold
of its main door. This article thus points to irreconcilable contradictions maintained by the Reformed faith that continues to bury black women in the ‘dungeons’ even today. The enfleshment of black bodies in the dungeons of the Elmina Castle underneath a Reformed
Church building is seen as the historical and heuristic starting point of engaging Reformed faith from a womanist perspective.

At the beginning of the 1995 gospel hit “If It Had Not Been for the Lord on My Side,” Helen Baylor opens with a testimony—the recounting of her experiences with substance abuse and the role that God played in her deliverance from those travails. Essential to Baylor’s testimony is her grandmother, who plays a pivotal role as an intercessor during the most difficult moments of her life. This chapter uses Baylor’s story, with particular emphasis on the relationship she describes with her grandmother, as a framing device for considering how testimony becomes a means of navigating the past and the present, and as a mode for connecting women to ancestral and intergenerational understandings of faith. In addition to interrogating the historical image, significance, and role of “the praying grandmother,” this chapter considers Zora Neale Hurston, engages the South Carolina lowcountry, and considers the lessons I learned from my own grandmothers as a primary means of investigating the varied spatial logics of black women’s faith traditions. The question guiding the essay is:  how does testimony become a means for understanding black women’s religious herstories of prophetic witness? JSTOR permalink: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7tq4rv

The purpose of this paper is to throw light on the representation of women in Ngugi wa Thiong’o Petals of Blood (1977) and Wizard of the Crow (2006) and how it is different from that of the West’s cultural imagination about the female African bodies. The paper will also consider the development of body politics in the African society. The study consists of four chapters. The first chapter provides a basic outline of what constitutes a ‘female’ and how gender of a woman affects her condition in the post-colonial period. The second chapter will focus on the figure of women in pre-colonial societies and in Kenya in Petals of Blood (1977). In the next chapter, the postcolonial women figures in Wizard of the Crow (2006) will be focused upon. The double marginalisation of women has been dealt with and a subsequent conclusion of the study is provided. The chapters will highlight how Petals of Blood (1977) has an affinity to African feminism and Wizard of the Crow (2006) as a revolutionary novel throws light on Western radical feminism in the context of Black women.

Dissertation Title is Black Women’s Leadership: Indigenous Knowledges for Empowerment

Abstract
In this chapter, I present the theoretical framework for analyzing the data of the study. I use an anti-colonial discursive framework through the epistemological lenses of indigenous knowledge, Black feminisms and womanism.

In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian African American, African American Samoan, African American Kiribati and African American move from being peoples characterized by loss and dispersion to people defined by convening our own reunions.

Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.

We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.

In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic.  This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...

Homelessness and the lack of financial independence chain maternalism and limit black women's pictures to stereotypes that present them as "bad mothers." This paper aims to explore black women's strive for representation in the Anglo-American theatre and how homelessness and maternalism are depicted by black female playwrights. Initially, this study shall distinguish between two domains that represent black women in the literary canon. Black Feminism and Womanism are used interchangeably in research; however, this paper seeks to find, through previous research, which term is more fitting for the context of this study. Another aim of this paper is to discuss the birth of Black British Feminism and how far the American scholarship represents British women as well as African American women. These topics are researched within a critical frame of two Anglo-American theatre productions; British essayist and playwright Michelle Inness's She Called Me Mother and American Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood. According to the context of these two dramas, the study comes to the conclusion that the term "womanist" does not describe black women's attitudes towards oppression, nor does it fit the male role in both plays. Also, maternalism comes to be confined by social circumstances that makes violence, physically and mentally, the controlling gear in mothers' and their children's lives.

This paper dwells on the analysis of So Long a Letter, a novella by Mariama Ba, a Senegalese woman with a view to bringing out the issue of polygamy as thematically presented in the work. The thematic analysis of So Long a Letter is an obvious one. It solely condemns polygamy and it devastating effects on the girl-child in a cultural context and as constraints on the happiness of couples who are usually separated. Feminism in its various strands was adopted as the theoretical framework. Women and men are guilty of polygamy as they collaborate in promoting the practice using religious and cultural platform while these actors have different motives.

Social imbalances between men and women are the bedrock of injustices women encounter in the world, particularly in African societies. Patriarchy is identified by womanist and feminist scholars as one of the social practices that give men more privilege and maintain women in peripheral roles. This article examines how female characters in African patriarchal settings of two Ghanaian male and female novels, Asare Adei's A Beautiful Daughter (2012) and Amma Darko's The Housemaid (1998) have been able to face/cope with men's oppressions through womanist and radical feminist theories. The findings have revealed that majority of the female characters are empowered economically and socially in the male and female fictional texts, and this has enabled them to combat men's patriarchal oppressions. The female characters' reactions vary from one another. Some of them made use of pacific ways such as dialogue, feminine solidarity or sisterhood in their attempts to address men's patriarchal oppressions, while others have made use of violence against men and children in their quest for justice and equality.

Let me tell you a story about an African Queen that ruled the West Coast of the United States of America. They call her Queen Calafia. In the continental U.S., there were Africans who came before slavery and have been there for thousands of years, way before Christopher Columbus was even born. In many cases, these Blacks and other indigenous nations established thriving civilizations in ancient America. Queen Calafia and the California Blacks were one of these ancient Black nations. And I aim to prove that the legends about her, the real Wonder woman, are based on Amazonian women living on the West Coast of America.

Alice Walker (1944-) has brought a new dimension to black feminism with her theory of womanism, which she explains in In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden (1983). She aims at achieving universality by extending her struggle to all people around the world, regardless of race, gender, and ethnical differences. According to Walker, it requires people to acknowledge their history, matrilineal descent, and black and non-black authors’ works inspiring them to struggle. She represents her womanist understanding in “Elethia” and “A Sudden Trip Home in Spring” in her collection entitled You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down (1981). The title character of “Elethia” and Sarah in “A Sudden Trip Home in Spring” face their problems and realize how to struggle against them. Thus, analyzing Walker’s selected stories, the study indicates that she presents a womanist way out for black people in the racist society through Elethia and Sarah.

Though the purity culture movement of the 1990s and 2000s situates itself as a God-ordained movement to bring North America back to Christ, its discoursive and rhetorical arguments are rooted in racism, White Christian heteropatriarchal nationalism, and colonialism. This paper seeks to demonstrate that as scholars and ex-evangelicals attempt to dismantle purity culture, if these conversations do not include a racial-informed and intersectional analysis, then purity scholars have the opportunity to perpetuate the same White supremacist harms that were part of the harms of purity culture. Further, scholars can learn much about intersectional and transformative healing practices by centering the voices and interventions of Black womanists and Black Feminists.

This paper unravels the dark side of apartheid system through the analysis of Alex La Guma's novella; A Walk in the Night. The analysis brings out how La Guma uses his literary texts under study to reveal to his readership the lost dignity of the oppressed. This novella reveals to readers the atrocities that were perpetrated against the non-whites in South Africa. This study highlights the restrictions placed on African workers under the oppressive Apartheid system and its effects on the psyche of the non-whites in South Africa have been given credible space in the novella. There is seen in this novella a fictionalization of the different forms of maltreatments that non-whites suffered during the Apartheid regime. There is also seen in the novella a relentless effort by La Guma to protest against the Apartheid era. The lifestyles of the non-whites clearly indicate that the Apartheid system really took away the dignity of the non-whites in South Africa.

"The truth telling Walker engages in in 'One Child of One's Own' reflects her bold unwillingness as a Black feminist artist and mother to silence, distort, or suppress her experiences of and ideas about motherhood and mothering. Although not without risk, this practice of truth telling is compelling, revolutionary, and a central, defining characteristic of Walker's womanist maternal."

Should I wear my Afro to my predominantly white workplace? Is one of the many questions Black Canadian women ask themselves due to the persisting anti-Black racist ideals that impede their livelihoods. This paper expands on Althea Prince’s foundational book The Politics of Black Women’s Hair (2009) by continuing discussions held with Black and mixed raced Canadian women about the societal perceptions of Black hair. The discriminatory practices demonstrated though case studies involving respectability politics in the workforce contradict Canadian values of multiculturalism. By highlighting Canadian contributions to the Natural Hair Movement, this paper identifies Black women’s self-led initiatives that challenge negative ideas surrounding their hair while encouraging Black women to claim space and exercise their right to be. Their complex views thus force a reconsideration of Canadian notions of Black presence. The Black women studied articulate this reassessment according to their own terms while concretizing their positions as valued Canadian citizens.

Bronwyn Hoskins-Davies (2013087818) Beauty has changed throughout the ages but one element of beauty that has not changed is the way in which women are forced to conform to an ideal of beauty that has been set by the media. Western standards of beauty are particularly problematic in that they take one small percentage of women and place them as the perfect standard resulting in a large majority of women feeling inadequate. In Toni Morrison's book The Bluest Eye, set in the 1940's, the African-American women of the book are under enourmous amounts of pressure on a daily basis to conform to the white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired standard of beauty that is set by the Western culture and the media. By using black female characters Morrison demonstrates the ways in which Western standards of beauty can affect women, particularly black women, and distort the way in which these women view themselves and those around them. The beauty standards that are placed on the women of this novel bring about various characteristics that eventually lead to either acceptance or rejection by society. The first way in which the destructive power of placing standards on beauty is presented is through Claudia Macteer and her inability to understand why whiteness, especially in a doll, is valued over living human blackness. Secondly it is demonstrated through Pecola Breedlove, a young girl who has been so warped by the idea of beauty and the way that society views her blackness that eventually her quest for blue eyes drives her insane.