Black women intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Black women, black ink: the "word" of black women abolitionist feminisms / Marquis Bey -- "To make myself and my people whole": Ida B. Wells as a public intellectual / Marsha J. Tyson Darling -- A presence and a voice: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and the Black Women's Club movement / Teresa Blue Holden -- Black women intellectuals in the new Negro era -- "Never" let color interfere?: the insurgent black intellectual writing of Jessie Redmon Fauset / Christopher Allen Varlack -- "Now you cookin' with gas": Zora Neale Hurston and her legacy / Nicole Anae -- The realisms of Elizabeth Catlett -- Kirstin L. Ellsworth -- Black women intellectuals in the civil rights-black power era -- "Sounding the trumpet": Anna Arnold Hedgeman and the civil rights movement in the north / Hettie V. Williams -- Pauli Murray: the life of an American intellectual / Kenya Davis-Hayes -- Wanda Coleman and Los Angeles: reading postmodern America from the eye of the cyclone / Charles Joseph -- "Pro black women, yet anti no one": black women intellectuals and the national alliance of black feminists / Voichita Nachescu -- Black women intellectuals in the post-civil rights era -- bell hooks: resistance writing beyond the academy / Ewa Kleczaj-Siara -- "At the core of the broken fruit?: on Audre Lorde's self-definitions and the critical deployment of the Dahomey/Yoruba lore / J. Edgar Bauer -- Black women intellectuals in the public square -- She who could never be ?just? anything: Toni Morrison, an American intellectual -- Marquis Bey -- African American women in the public sphere: Admiral Michelle Howard -- Melissa Ziobro.
Summary:
"This book rejects the notion that black women were at the margin of American intellectual life. Black women as preachers, abolitionists, creative writers, and civil rights activists are examined here to illustrate the fundamental position that black women intellectuals occupied in modern U.S. history, while at the same time demonstrating how these women used the public sphere and writing as an attempt at self-articulation. For these women, writing and speaking served simultaneously as acts of self-articulation and as calls to action. The art of testimony and confession was utilized by black women in their campaigns of social reform and beyond. Michel Foucault argues that "power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations." African American women despite living in an unequal society operationalized their voices in the quest for universal human rights throughout U.S. history as traditional, public, and organic intellectuals. This volume is divided into five major sections to illustrate this history."--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.