Lexington Books African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being

African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women's writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley's veiled remembrances to Hurston's explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston's icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women's writings. Review ...a comprehensive work that takes into historical and cultural consideration the employ of African cosmological aesthetics in creative work by women writers of African ancestry in North America.... African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community and Being by author Elizabeth J. West offers a rich chronological analysis of more than the employ of religiosities as a marker for Black cultural expression in Black women's writing from the nineteenth century forward. The text demonstrates a parallel read of the rising importance of class as an articulation of Black assimilation, or attempt to assimilate, into the developing aesthetic that would culturally define what it meant to be "American" during the epoch.... The work emerges as a literary historiographic piece that provides for the readership early examples of the inseparability of African-American fiction from African-American reality.--South Atlantic Review West's fine study adds to a growing body of literature demonstrating the impact of African heritage on African American culture. West (Georgia State Univ.) makes an important advance on this tradition, exploring ways in which African spirituality is woven into the more obvious Christian elements of the works. This clearly written, well-researched study treats the canon of African women's literature from Phillis Wheatley through the Harlem Renaissance. The author discusses well-known works--Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand--but is at her best in her exploration of less-familiar texts, e.g., Hannah Crafts's The Bondswoman's Narrative; Gifts of Power, a collection of Rebecca Jackson's writings (CH, Dec'81); and Jarena Lee's Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee....The specificity of the topic makes the book most appropriate for large collections. Summing Up: Recommended.--CHOICE With the publication of African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction, Elizabeth J. West has added rich new thread to the tapestry of criticism of the fictional works by African American women. While scholars in other fields of inquiry have hinted at the presence of Africanity in such fictional works, West is among the first to really carve out a space for an extended literary critique of an African presence in the tradition of black women writers....She painstakingly lays the groundwork of her critique by simplifying a rather complex African cosmology....West's contribution to the already rich scholarship on black women's writing is provocative, necessary, and much welcomed, for it provides casual readers, scholars, and teachers alike much fertile ground in which