Dark Bodies of Discourse: Nineteenth-Century African American Women and the Power of the Word

Abstract

In her foreword to William Andrews's Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, Marilyn Richards writes that once we affirm the significance of such well-known nineteenth-century African American women as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, we have a responsibility as readers and scholars then to recognize that they were neither isolated nor atypical, but were inheritors of a black female tradition of activism founded on a commitment to religious faith, human rights, and women's struggles.' It is precisely this triad of community, tradition, and activism that dominates the substantial body of scholarship specifically about nineteenth-century African American women. From the very first page of Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, Carla Peterson aligns her book with such prestigious volumes as the aforementioned Sisters of the Spirit, Dorothy Sterling's We are Your Sisters, Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, Joanne Braxton's Black Women Writing Autobiography and Frances Smith Foster's Written by Herself, among