Transforming scriptures : African American women writers and the Bible / Katherine Clay Bassard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bassard, Katherine Clay, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

African American women--Religion.

African American women.

African American women in literature.

Bible--In literature.

Bible.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (177 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the "great code" of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective "literary witness" to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. Black women's historic encounters with the Bible were, indeed, transformational; in the process of "turning cursing into blessing" these women were both shaped and reshaped by the scriptures they appropriated for their own self-representation. Two important biblical figures emerge as key tropes around which women fashioned a counternarrative to the dominant culture's "curse" on black female identity: the "talking mule" from Numbers 22 and the "black but comely" Shulamite of Song of Songs, the Queen of Sheba. Transforming Scriptures analyzes these tropes within a range of contexts, from biblical justifications of slavery and the second-class status of women to hermeneutical and post-structural critiques of the Bible. African American women's appropriations of scripture occur within a continuum of African American Bible-reading practices and religious or ideological commitments, argues Bassard. There is thus no single "black women's hermeneutic"; rather, theories of African American women and the Bible must account for historical and social change and difference.

Contents:

Talking mules and troubled hermeneutics: Black women's biblical self-disclosures

Private interpretations: the Bible defense of slavery and nineteenth-century racial hermeneutics

Sampling the scriptures: Maria W. Stewart and the genre of prayer

Hannah's craft: biblical passing in The bondwoman's narrative

"Beyond mortal vision": identification and miscegenation in the Joseph cycle and Harriet E. Wilson's Our nig

And the greatest of these: eros, philos, and agape in two contemporary Black women's novels.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612553110

9781282553118

1282553119

9780820336138

0820336130

OCLC:

615629321