This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore.

From the earliest slave narratives to modern fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, African American authors have drawn on African spiritual practices as literary inspiration, and as a way to maintain a connection to Africa. This volume has collected new essays about the multiple ways African American authors have incorporated Voodoo, Hoodoo and Conjure in their work. Among the authors covered are Frederick Douglass, Shirley Graham, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ntozake Shange, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Ishmael Reed.

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

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. Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary. Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

The Lemonade Reader is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, Lemonade. The essays and editorials present fresh, cutting-edge scholarship fueled by contemporary thoughts on film, material culture, religion, and black feminism. Envisioned as an educational tool to support and guide discussions of the visual album at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, The Lemonade Reader critiques Lemonade’s multiple Afrodiasporic influences, visual aesthetics, narrative arc of grief and healing, and ethnomusicological reach. The essays, written by both scholars and popular bloggers, reflects a broad yet uniquely specific black feminist investigation into constructions of race, gender, spirituality, and southern identity. The Lemonade Reader gathers a newer generation of black feminist scholars to engage in intellectual discourse and confront the emotional labor around the Lemonade phenomena. It is the premiere source for examining Lemonade, a text that will continue to have a lasting impact on black women’s studies and popular culture.

The literary tradition begun by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s has since flourished and taken new directions with a diverse body of fiction by more contemporary African-American women writers. This book examines the treatment of domestic violence in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Love, Terry McMillan's Mama and A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and Octavia Butler's Seed to Harvest. These novels have given voice to oppressed and abused women. The aims of this work are threefold: to examine how female African American novelists portray domestic abuse; to outline how literary depictions of domestic violence are responsive to cultural and historical forces; and to explore the literary tradition of novels that deal with domestic abuse within the African American community.

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

This book critically examines the collection, interpretation, and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from an Afrocentric perspective. The necessity of interpretive Afrocentric research is relevant to position agency and to locate Africana studies in place, space, and time. This study will provide readers with a compilation of literary, historical, philosophical, and social science essays that describe and evaluate the Africana experience from a methodological perspective. Paradoxically, the collection presents measurable and qualitative research, in order to flush out a global Pan–Africanist consciousness.

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

Tropical Gothic examines Gothic within a specific geographical area of ‘the South’ of the Americas. In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates (from North to South) and move between various national traditions of the gothic (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc) alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic (the US south and the Caribbean) as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas. The reflections on national traditions of the Gothic in this volume add to the critical body of literature on specific languages or particular nations, such as Scottish Gothic, American Gothic, Canadian Gothic, German Gothic, Kiwi Gothic, etc. This is significant because, while the Southern Gothic in the US has been thoroughly explored, there is a gap in the critical literature about the Gothic in the larger context of region of ‘the South’ in the Americas. This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of tropical Gothic in the Americas; rather, it pinpoints a variety of locations where this form of the Gothic emerges. In so doing, the transnational interventions of the Gothic in this book read the flows of Gothic forms across borders and geographical regions to tease out the complexities of Gothic cultural production within cultural and linguistic translations. Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. In other cases, the vast populations of African slaves were transported, endowing these regions with a cultural inheritance that all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend. The volume reflects on how these histories influence the Gothic in this region.