Black Women and Historical Wellness

Abstract

Black Women and Historical Wellness Kimberly Akano (bio) Stephanie Evans's Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021 Amid individual, interpersonal, and sociopolitical stressors, what resources have Black women leveraged to care for themselves and their communities? For some like Harriet Jacobs or Angela Davis, stretching served as a lifeline for dealing with physical confinement during periods of enslavement or imprisonment. For Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, writing and mindfulness nurtured their intellectual health while navigating challenging academic institutions. Still, others such as Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner found comfort while moving their bodies to accomplish daily household chores—out of view from the public eye that typically followed them. For all of these women, such strategies formed the building blocks of robust practices that aligned the mind, body, and spirit. These women and many others are part of a larger tradition of Black women's embodied efforts to pursue health and healing. In Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, historian Stephanie Evans traces an expansive history of Black women's ideas surrounding mental health and physical well-being as they navigate stress and trauma in their everyday lives. This history decenters an emphasis on South Asian and white American iterations of yoga to shed light on African and African American contributions to yoga history—what she ultimately calls "Africana yoga" (365). By adopting a capacious understanding of yoga to include prayer, exercise, and meditation practices, Evans argues that African American women's pursuit of wellness is anything but new. Instead, Black women's healing traditions reflect an enduring legacy of "historical wellness," the sustained ways of being and knowing that Black women apply to prioritize individual and communal health (364). For Evans, a [End Page 329] historical wellness approach to Black women's understandings of wellness requires situating their healing traditions within the larger context of Black women's struggles against racism, sexual violence, and the many other challenges that threaten African American women's flourishing. In doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga. This approach also seeks to consider how the experiences and epistemological contributions of Black women "show us inner peace is possible, historical, practical, and teachable" (136). As a work of intellectual history, Evans attends to a selection of Black women's memoirs and autobiographies to analyze how African American women have narrated their stress management strategies over time. In particular, she focuses on the writings of Black women senior elders (those age seventy and above) and Black women midlife elders (those age fifty and above). Evans situates these writings before and after 1975 when the first issue of Yoga Journal, a national publication, gained national attention. Using her method of "narrative portraiture," Evans artfully weaves biographical data with historical analysis to provide robust depictions of African American women's lives (43). These portraits offer an intimate look at subjective experiences of loss, trauma, and healing. They also suggest that past and present socio-political developments such as enslavement, the Great Migration, and the #MeToo movement required African American women to assess and refashion their varied approaches to health over time. For example, Evans gestures toward an increasing need for Black women to reconsider how nuanced understandings of wellness may positively contribute to more contemporary conversations about social media usage, classroom pedagogy, and public health policy. Indeed, rather than settling for one-dimensional portrayals of Black women that overemphasize life's trials or triumphs, Evans considers the "beautiful, ugly, and healing" moments that inform the dynamism of African American women's wellness writings (36). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Evans ultimately calls "Africana yoga" involves Rosa Parks's dedicated yoga practice, which, in part, sustained her lifelong commitment to activism. Evans's keen analysis of Rosa Parks's engagement with yoga stands as an apt illustration of one of her primary assertions that "it is political for Black women to claim ownership or possession, of their own bodies" (47). In other words, Black...