This panel harnesses the works of such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Elizabeth Wright to reflect, respond and critique the characterization and embodiment of the spiritual practice of Black women in modern literature. How does language, storytelling and the choreosonic murmurings in modern African-American literature centered around women signal joy, despair, hope, and trauma wedded to flight, freedom, wailing, mothering, transgressive acts, personal intimacies and the ongoing survival of Black women? How do we as writers and readers interrogate situations where faith that provides uplift or challenges the identity of characters in a narrative? From various registers these papers explore power dynamics, meditations on the provenance and purpose of one’s life, agency, opportunities and threats. And, they ask us as readers, writers and educators to consider the benefits and challenges of working with these kinds of sources as teaching tools, and sources of knowledge formation.
The literary genius of Toni Morrison extends beyond her revered novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, and song cycle lyrics. Few outside the opera world are familiar with her libretto for _Margaret Garner_, a 21st-century opera inspired by her novel_Beloved_ and the true story of an enslaved mother who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure freedom for herself and her children. Premiering in 2005, this acclaimed production is a prime source for theological reflection and a repository of the African American community's ancestral cultural memories and faith traditions. Morrison’s historic imagination presents a portrait of antebellum life, portraying one enslaved woman’s humanity, faith, religious traditions, and quest for freedom.
What if anything is the difference between the stories and motivations of enslaved Africans in America risking everything to escape to freedom and migrants attempting to cross the southern borders of America today, risking everything seeking an unknown, elusive, imagined freedom.
Since ameliorating archival silencing of Black women requires a shift in how scholars hear Black women, this paper listens between lines for the noisiness of Black women’s religious cultures in twentieth century Black American literature. I argue that Black women make religious noise that offers a “choreosonic” critique of the archive. First, I situate Black women and their archival silencing within a historical context of the modern West’s degradation of the so-called lesser senses and the racialization of sound. Then, I delve into an analysis of three noisy scenes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1938) Tell My Horse. Through a choreosonicity that critiques origins, hierarchy, and order, these literary giants introduce scholars to Black women whose religious noises call the silencing structures of the archive into question and invite scholars to do the same.
This paper reads Black women’s archival engagements and resulting literary work for the religious matter this literature is based upon and reproduces. Whereas connections between the archive, religion, and Black women’s history and literature are readily made in the body of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black-authored work (Carby 1987; Tate 1992; Higginbotham 1993; Ernest 2004; Maffly-Kipp 2010), I argue that they are also at work in later twentieth-century writing. I read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved with Beverly Jenkins’s Indigo, the most commented-upon work of contemporary Black historical popular romance by scholars and readers alike. Drawing upon Julie Dash, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Darlene Clark Hine, Christina Sharpe, and others, I show how the provenance of each novel’s historical, archival inspiration reveals both a religious basis and religious productivity at work. These connections expand the breadth of literary work significant to a Black women’s readership that read across genre.
This paper considers how mothering, spiritual practice, and desires for survival intersect in the life of Mariah Upshur, the protagonist at the center of Sarah Elizabeth Wright’s 1969 novel This Child’s Gonna Live. Set in 1930s eastern Maryland, the reading audience hears a narrative voice not often heard in American literature—a Black woman living in a poor, fishing town named Tangierneck. This paper engages literary, textual, and archival methods and analyses to examine the interiority and possibilities of Black maternal spiritual life. By connecting Wright’s work to the Black mothering literary prototypes in Toni Morrison’s novels, Black feminists and womanists’ engagements with these literary tropes, and the politics of Black motherhood forged in places of abject poverty, environmental racism, and misogynoir, this paper considers how the intimacies born out of a connection to one’s children and desires for community help to preserve Black women’s faith, interiority, and material lives.
By juxtaposing the queer protagonists of Toni Morrison’s Sula and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple with contemporary black queer living texts, I will illuminate a more pluralistic theorizing of liberatory womanist leadership. In this paper, I will explore literary and autobiographical texts to interrogate moral lessons gleaned from lesbian leadership specifically highlighting the role of testimony as a trope for communal salvation. With attention to past fictional influencers (Sula and Nel from Sula and Celie and Shug from The Color Purple) and current religious activists, my paper will examine womanist markers of ethical leadership such as truth-telling, agency, and communal empowerment. Ultimately, I contend that by closely observing “transgressive” women through the lens of womanist and feminist queer theory and theologies of redemption, we can gain tools for expanding notions of moral leadership.