Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women’s spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé.
“Maha Marouan beautifully illumines the strategies of Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, and Maryse Condé in reconstructing religions of the African diaspora as models of female liberation, inscribing black female spirituality into history and effectively addressing social injustice. She gets hold of the thrust of these three novelists and demonstrates how they compose fresh models of female spirituality, invoke groundbreaking cultural associations and forms of religious creolization, and generate new spiritual assurance for Africana women. Thus, Marouan presents us with a powerful work appealing to scholars and students in religion, cultural studies, literature, and diaspora studies.”
—Jacob K. Olupona, professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and African Religious Traditions at Harvard Divinity School
“This is clearly a fine, talented young scholar. She is innovative in her approach to literature, ranging across disciplines to open a discussion of diaspora identity that is badly needed. This work, with its attention to multiple methods, theories, and media, will open an important discussion in African and African Diaspora Studies.”
—Carolyn Jones Medine, associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
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Race and Displacement
Race and Displacement captures a timely set of discussions about the roles of race in displacement, forced migrations, nation and nationhood, and the way continuous movements of people challenge fixed racial definitions.
The multifaceted approach of the essays in Race and Displacement allows for nuanced discussions of race and displacement in expansive ways, exploring those issues in transnational and global terms. The contributors not only raise questions about race and displacement as signifying tropes and lived experiences; they also offer compelling approaches to conversations about race, displacement, and migration both inside and outside the academy. Taken together, these essays become a case study in dialogues across disciplines, providing insight from scholars in diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, race theory, gender studies, and migration studies.
The contributors to this volume use a variety of analytical and disciplinary methodologies to track multiple articulations of how race is encountered and defined. The book is divided by editors Maha Marouan and Merinda Simmons into four sections: “Race and Nation” considers the relationships between race and corporality in transnational histories of migration using literary and oral narratives. Essays in “Race and Place” explore the ways spatial mobility in the twentieth century influences and transforms notions of racial and cultural identity. Essays in “Race and Nationality” address race and its configuration in national policy, such as racial labeling, federal regulations, and immigration law. In the last section, “Race and the Imagination” contributors explore the role imaginative projections play in shaping understandings of race.