New Black Feminist Criticism 1985 2000

A passionate and celebrated pioneer in her own words New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000 collects a selection of essays and reviews from Barbara Christian, one of the founding voices in black feminist literary criticism. Published between the release of her second landmark book Black Feminist Criticism and her death, these writings include eloquent reviews, evaluations of black feminist criticism as a discipline, reflections on black feminism in the academy, and essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and others.

A collection of critical essays on African-American women writers.

Examines defining moments in African American women's fiction and its reception: the 'Women's Era' of the 1890s, the Harlem Renaissance, and the 'New Black Renaissance' of the 1970s and 1980s. This book discusses representations of slavery, sexuality, and homoeroticism.

Now in its fourth edition, Literary Theory: The Basics is an essential guide to the complicated and often confusing world of literary theory. Readers will encounter a broad range of topics from Marxist and feminist criticism to postmodernism, queer studies, and ecocriticism. Literary Theory: The Basics shows, in an always lucid and accessible style, how literary theory and practice are connected, and considers key theories and approaches including: humanist criticism; structuralist and poststructuralist theory; postcolonial theory; posthumanism, ecocriticism, and animal studies; digital humanities and print culture studies. Literary theory has much to say about the wider world of humanities and beyond, and this guide helps readers to approach the many theories and debates with confidence. Expanded with updates throughout, this is the go-to guide for understanding literary theory today.

Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 centers twentieth and twenty-first century black-transnational stereotypes, celebrities, and symbols Lena Horne's, Dorothy Dandridge;s, and Queen Latifah’s transnational popular cultural struggles between domination and autonomy, with a particular emphasis on their films and popular music. Linking each performer to twentieth century U.S., African-American, and global gender histories and noting the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and empire in their overlapping transnational biographies, Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 connects Horne, Dandridge, and Latifah to each other and legacies of Hollywood stereotypes and popular music’s internationally-routed politics. Through a close reading of Horne's, Dandridge's, and Latifah’s films and popular music, the performers tie to historic black-transnational caricatures, from the “tragic mulatto” to Sapphire, Mammy, and Jezebel, and additional, non-white female performers, from Josephine Baker to Halle Berry, maneuvering within transnational popular culture industrial matrices and against white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal forces.

Resistance Reimagined highlights unconventional modes of black women's activism within a society that has spoken so much of freedom but has granted it so selectively. Looking closely at nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings by African American women that reimagine antebellum America, Regis Fox introduces types of black activism that differ from common associations with militancy and maleness. In doing so, she confronts expectations about what African American literature can and should be. Fox analyzes Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose. The thinkers highlighted by Fox have been dismissed as elitist, accommodationist, or complicit—yet Fox reveals that in reality, these women use their writing to protest antiblack violence, reject superficial reform, call for major sociopolitical change, and challenge the false promises of American democracy.

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno).

This thoroughly updated third edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism and postcolonial criticism. This new edition features: a major expansion of the chapter on postcolonial criticism that includes topics such as Nordicism, globalization and the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory, global tourism and global conservation an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts a list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.