Womanist Literature: Course Texts

"In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages." -- (Source of summary not specified)

Writing across theological disciplines, nine African American women scholars reflect on what it means to live as responsible doers of justice. Each chapter presents analytical strategies for understanding the story of womanist scholarship in the service of the black community.

This study articulates the distinctive moral character of the African-American women's community. Beginning with a reconstructive history of the African-American woman's situation in America, Dr. Cannon then traces the emergence of the Black woman's literary tradition and explains its importance in expressing the moral wisdom of Black women.

Womanist approaches to the study of religion and society have contributed much to our understanding of Black religious life, activism, and women's liberation. This book explores the achievements of this movement over the past two decades and evaluates some of the leading voices and different perspectives within this burgeoning field.

In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia's ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike.

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. (PBS)

Nella Larsen's first novel... is a superb psychological study of a complicated and appealing woman, Helga Crane, who, like Larsen herself, is the product of a liaison between a black man and a white woman. In one sense,

"Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 50's, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her ... Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page."--Off Our Backs.

Nel Wright and Sula Peace... meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal--or does it end?--From publisher description.

No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann's mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive. It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica.

The Bailey... serves up lousy coffee and greasy food at that crossroads of the world, Brooklyn in 1948. {Bailey, with his wife Nadine,] acts as tour guide, taking the reader through the lives of the cafe's habitues--prostitutes, pimps, madams and other human flotsam... Their lives are revealed in lyrical vignettes combining first- and third-person narration. (Publishers Weekly)

Charting the course of womanist theory from its genesis as Alice Walker's African-American feminism, through Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi's African womanism and Clenora Hudson-Weems' Africana womanism, to its present-day expression as a global, anti-oppressionist perspective rooted in the praxis of everyday women of color, this interdisciplinary reader traces the rich and diverse history of a quarter century of womanist thought. [It features] selections from over a dozen disciplines by top womanist scholars from around the world, plus several critiques of womanism, an extensive bibliography of womanist sources, and the first ever systematic treatment of womanist thought on its own terms.

Precious Jones, 16 years old and pregnant by her father with her second child, meets a determined and highly radical teacher who takes her on a journey of transformation and redemption.

First published in 1975 ...it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had." Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

This is the story of two sisters—one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South—who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.

Narrated by Lynne Thigpen.

Narrated by Kimberly Scott

Narrated by Ruby Dee

Narrated by Toni Morrison.

Narrated by Bahni Turpin.

Narrated by Thandie Newton

Chapter 4:
"When Caged Bodies Testify: Continental and African Descended Women's Memoirs as Sacred Text"" by Melanie C. Jones and Liz S. Alexander.

Chapter 4:
"When Caged Bodies Testify: Continental and African Descended Women's Memoirs as Sacred Text"" by Melanie C. Jones and Liz S. Alexander.