Freedom Narratives of African American Women

Freedom Narratives of African American Women
Title Freedom Narratives of African American Women PDF eBook
Author Janaka Bowman Lewis
Publisher McFarland
Pages 183
Release 2017-12-21
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1476667780

Download Freedom Narratives of African American Women Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Stories of liberation from enslavement or oppression have become central to African American women's literature. Beginning with a discussion of black women freedom narratives as a literary genre, the author argues that these texts represent a discourse on civil rights that emerged earlier than the ideas of racial uplift that culminated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An examination of the collective free identity of black women and their relationships to the community focuses on education, individual progress, marriage and family, labor, intellectual commitments and community rebuilding projects.

Something Akin to Freedom

Something Akin to Freedom
Title Something Akin to Freedom PDF eBook
Author Stephanie Li
Publisher State University of New York Press
Pages 179
Release 2010-02-23
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 143842972X

Download Something Akin to Freedom Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why would someone choose bondage over individual freedom? What type of freedom can be found in choosing conditions of enslavement? In Something Akin to Freedom, winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Stephanie Li explores literary texts where African American women decide to remain in or enter into conditions of bondage, sacrificing individual autonomy to achieve other goals. In fresh readings of stories by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Gayl Jones, Louisa Picquet, and Toni Morrison, Li argues that amid shifting positions of power and through acts of creative agency, the women in these narratives make seemingly anti-intuitive choices that are simultaneously limiting and liberating. She explores how the appeal of the freedom of the North is constrained by the potential for isolation and destabilization for women rooted in strong social networks in the South. By introducing reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, Li expands our understanding of individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love.

The Freedom to Remember

The Freedom to Remember
Title The Freedom to Remember PDF eBook
Author Angelyn Mitchell
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Pages 262
Release 2002
Genre History
ISBN 9780813530697

Download The Freedom to Remember Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the "safe" vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Title The Long Walk to Freedom PDF eBook
Author Devon W. Carbado
Publisher Beacon Press
Pages 273
Release 2012-08-21
Genre History
ISBN 0807069132

Download The Long Walk to Freedom Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In this groundbreaking compilation of first-person accounts of the runaway slave phenomenon, editors Devon Carbado and Donald Weise have recovered twelve narratives spanning eight decades—more than half of which have been long out of print. Told in the voices of the runaway slaves themselves, these narratives reveal the extraordinary and often innovative ways that these men and women sought freedom and demanded citizenship.

Finding Charity’s Folk

Finding Charity’s Folk
Title Finding Charity’s Folk PDF eBook
Author Jessica Millward
Publisher University of Georgia Press
Pages 160
Release 2015-12-15
Genre History
ISBN 0820348791

Download Finding Charity’s Folk Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.

Lighting the Fires of Freedom

Lighting the Fires of Freedom
Title Lighting the Fires of Freedom PDF eBook
Author Janet Dewart Bell
Publisher The New Press
Pages 176
Release 2018-05-08
Genre History
ISBN 1620973367

Download Lighting the Fires of Freedom Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Recommended by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Book Riot and Autostraddle Nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, a groundbreaking collection of profiles of African American women leaders in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women's all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that are vital and relevant today. A vital document for understanding the Civil Rights Movement, Lighting the Fires of Freedom is an enduring testament to the vitality of women's leadership during one of the most dramatic periods of American history.

Six Women's Slave Narratives

Six Women's Slave Narratives
Title Six Women's Slave Narratives PDF eBook
Author William L. Andrews
Publisher Oxford University Press, USA
Pages 382
Release 1988
Genre American literature
ISBN 9780195052626

Download Six Women's Slave Narratives Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Six narrations by slave women about their lives during and after their years in bondage, honoring the nobility and strength of African-American women of that era.