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One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group--which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others--would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group's everyday collaboration and profound legacy. The Sisterhood advocated for Black women writers at trade publishers and magazines such as Random House, Ms., and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as well--often in the face of sexist, racist, and homophobic backlash. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political ties that brought the group together as well as the reasons for its dissolution. She considers the popular and critical success of Sisterhood members in the 1980s, the uneasy absorption of Black feminism into the academy, and how younger writers built on the foundations the group laid. Highlighting the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women's writing, this book demonstrates that The Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration.

American literature --- Feminism in literature --- Women authors, Black --- History and criticism

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"Imagine being born into a world where everything about you--the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth--designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving everything you know and finding some way to survive, in the name of your family and your people. Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda--the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving, Cockroaches is a window onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror"

Atrocities. --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY --- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY --- Ethnic relations. --- Genocide --- Genocide. --- Hutu (African people) --- Hutu (African people) --- Tutsi (African people) --- Tutsi (African people) --- Women authors, Black --- Women authors, Black. --- Historical. --- Personal Memoirs. --- Women. --- History --- Politics and government --- Politics and government. --- Crimes against --- History --- Crimes against. --- Mukasonga, Scholastique. --- Mukasonga, Scholastique. --- Civil War (Rwanda : 1994). --- 1900-2099. --- Rwanda --- Rwanda --- Rwanda --- Rwanda. --- Ethnic relations --- History --- History --- Atrocities

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This book develops a theory of multimodality – the participation of a text in more than one mode – centred on the poetry/poetics of Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. How do these poets represent oral Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) in writing and negotiate the relationship between the high literary in Canadian letters and the social and historical meanings of CECs? How do the latter relate to the idea of “female and black”? Through fluid use of code- and mode-switching, the movement of Brand and Philip between creole and standard English, and written orality and standard writing forms part of their meanings. Allen’s eye-spellings precisely indicate stereotypical creole sounds, yet use the phonological system of standard English. On stage, Allen projects a black female body in the world and as a speaking subject. She thereby shows that the implication of the written in the literary excludes her body’s language (as performance); and she embodies her poetry to realize a ‘language’ alternative to the colonizing literary. Harris’s creole writing helps her project a fragmented personality, a range of dialects enabling quite different personae to emerge within one body. Thus Harris, Brand, Philip, and Allen both project the identity “female and black” and explore this social position in relation to others. Considering textual multimodality opens up a wide range of material connections. Although written, this poetry is also oral; if oral, then also embodied; if embodied, then also participating in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other systems of social organization and individual identity. Finally, the semiotic body as a mode (i.e. as a resource for making meaning) allows written meanings to be made that cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In every case, Allen, Philip, Harris, and Brand escape the constraints of dominant media, refiguring language via dialect and mode to represent a black feminist sensibility.

Women authors, Black --- Canadian literature --- Women authors, Black. --- Black women authors --- Canadian literature (English) --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- Black authors --- Black authors. --- Harris, Claire, --- Philip, Marlene Nourbese, --- Allen, Lillian, --- Brand, Dionne, --- Nourbese Philip, Marlene, --- Philip, M. Nourbese --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Canada. --- Canada (Province) --- Canadae --- Ceanada --- Chanada --- Chanadey --- Dominio del Canad --- Dominion of Canada --- Jianada --- Kʻaenada --- Kanada --- Ḳanadah --- Kanadaja --- Kanadas --- Ḳanade --- Kanado --- Kanak --- Province of Canada --- Republica de Canad --- Yn Chanadey --- Allen, Lillian Diana, --- Dominio del Canadá --- Kaineḍā --- Kanakā --- Republica de Canadá

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"Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory"--

Horror in literature. --- African American women authors. --- Women authors, Black --- Feminist theory. --- Feminism --- Feminist philosophy --- Feminist sociology --- Theory of feminism --- Black women authors --- Afro-American women authors --- Women authors, African American --- Women authors, American --- History and criticism. --- Philosophy --- England. --- african literature. --- african. --- diaspora. --- haiti. --- horror fiction. --- horror. --- jamaica. --- literature. --- shakespeare. --- tempest. --- trinidad. --- women.