Early American women critics : performance, religion, race / Gay Gibson Cima.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cima, Gay Gibson, 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women critics--United States--History.

Women critics.

Critical theory.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xi, 241 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Summary:

Early American Women Critics demonstrates that performances of various kinds - religious, political, and cultural - enabled women to enter the human rights debates that roiled the American colonies and young republic. Black and white women staked their claims on American citizenship through disparate performances of spirit possession, patriotism, and poetic and theatrical production. They protected themselves within various shields that allowed them to speak openly while keeping the individual basis of their identities invisible. Cima shows that between the First and Second Great Religious Awakenings (1730s-1830s), women from West Africa, Europe, and various corners of the American colonies self-consciously adopted performance strategies that enabled them to critique American culture and establish their own diverse and contradictory claims on the body politic. This book restores the primacy of religious performances - Christian, Yoruban, Bantu, and Muslim - to the study of early American cultural and political histories, revealing that religion and race are inseparable.

Contents:

1 Colonial Women Critics: Performing Religion, Race, Possession, and Pornography 18

2 Revolutionary Women Critics: Performing Rational Christianity, Patriotism, and Race 70

3 Republican Women Critics: Performing Christian Activism, American Culture, and Race 149.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0521847338

OCLC:

70272904