A01=Katherine Clay Bassard
Abolitionism
Absalom Jones
African American Vernacular English
African Americans
African Methodist Episcopal Church
African-American literature
Alice Walker
Ann Plato
Anne Bradstreet
Author_Katherine Clay Bassard
Autobiography
Bell hooks
Beloved (novel)
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Black church
Black people
Black school
Carter G. Woodson
Catechism
Category=DSB
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
Celibacy
Conversion narrative
Cornel West
Cotton Mather
Counterculture
Critical theory
Culture of the Southern United States
Dust Tracks on a Road
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frances Harper
Free negro
Free people of color
Gender Trouble
Genre
Gloria Naylor
God
Harriet E. Wilson
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Home Girls
Hortense Spillers
Ideology
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Ivan van Sertima
James Weldon Johnson
Jarena Lee
Jean Fagan Yellin
Judith Butler
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Lemuel Haynes
Literature
Lorraine Hansberry
Luisah Teish
Maria W. Stewart
Mary Prince
Melville J. Herskovits
Memoir
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mrs.
Mules and Men
Narrative
Nella Larsen
Olaudah Equiano
Oppression
Our Nig
Pauline Hopkins
Performative utterance
Phillis Wheatley
Poems on Various Subjects
Poetry
Post-structuralism
Puritans
Racialization
Racism
Religion
Religious and Moral
Religious experience
Self-Reliance
Shakers
Slave narrative
Slavery
Sojourner Truth
Spiritual (music)
Spiritual autobiography
Spirituality
Steal Away
Subjectivity
Susannah
The Dark Abode
The Signifying Monkey
The Souls of Black Folk
Theology
Veve
Vincent Harding
Winthrop Jordan
Writing
Zilpha Elaw
Product details
- ISBN 9780691016474
- Weight: 28g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 07 Feb 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people. Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with African Methodism. Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spirituals matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora.
Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life.
Katherine Clay Bassard is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have been published in African American Review and Callaloo.
