Margaret Walker Research Articles

전통음악과 서울올림픽 행사에 관한 당대 논의의 재검토－Margaret Walker Dilling의 자료와 해석을 중심으로－

전통음악과 서울올림픽 행사에 관한 당대 논의의 재검토－Margaret Walker Dilling의 자료와 해석을 중심으로－

Black Womanhood and (Un)Silenced Voices in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

Black Womanhood and (Un)Silenced Voices in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt

Reviewed by: Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt Brandy Thomas Wells Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. Edited by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. vi, 244. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1365-7.) Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective joins a reinvigorated conversation about black intellectuals and their complex range of ideas. This interdisciplinary book moves beyond the common discussion of popular liberals, who are most visible during frenzied moments, to the margins, where radical, feminist, Marxist, and conservative black intellectuals have largely been cast. Expanding the theoretical and historical underpinnings of black intellectualism, the volume aims to "complicate how black intellectualism is academically and popularly understood" (p. 9). Gregory D. Smithers opens the text with an overview of black intellectual thought from the late eighteenth century to World War II. Smithers explains that from the 1800s, black intellectualism was rooted in Christianity, abolitionism, and liberal ideas, broadly defined. This tradition was joined by other forms of thinking, including black Marxism and black feminism. As black intellectuals sought to mitigate the complexities of race and racism and to accomplish their own aspirations, they remained a diverse and complex group. In providing readers with "a genealogy of black Marxism," Minkah Makalani challenges a discussion that has often been limited to the Communist Party of the United States during the Cold War (p. 38). After providing a rich historiography of black Marxist writing and thought, Makalani follows Frantz Fanon in stretching the definition of Marxism to make room for discourses on coloniality. Readers are introduced to Amílcar Cabral, whose thinking did not stop at imperialism but also addressed cultural revolution. Makalani closes the essay by considering the abandonment of this cultural nationalism in the sectarian turn in U.S. black Marxism. Brian D. Behnken's essay broadly considers black liberalism. Behnken grants attention to the life work of James W. C. Pennington, Carter G. Woodson, and Marion Thompson Wright, since scholarly activity was considered the best means of changing white perspectives. If black liberals' desires could be summarized as possessing a singular goal, Behnken makes clear that "racial change was it" (p. 81). Even so, Behnken rightly shows that black liberalism has undergone many iterations and defies neat categorization. Danielle L. Wiggins provides what could be called a companion essay to the preceding chapter. Correcting a false view that the black conservative tradition began after the civil rights era, Wiggins uncovers a "conservative radicalism" from the time of seventeenth-century black thinkers (p. 111). Although the number of black conservatives declined during the New Deal, Wiggins shows that this intellectual tradition remained deeply rooted. In the 1970s and 1980s, black neoconservatives "united in a shared critique of American liberalism and [End Page 493] the active role of the state" in black life (p. 115). Though marginally accepted among the New Right, black neoconservatives have shaped the parameters of discussions of black culture, education, welfare, and affirmative action. In an enthralling essay, Benita Roth turns her attention to black feminist intellectuals. She examines the views and arguments of black women communists concerning the triple exploitation faced by black women. The arguments of Claudia Jones and others were resurrected in the 1950s and 1960s, as black feminist scholars, through writing and organization, challenged racial and gender oppressions. In weighing Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's recognition of intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the need for a "Say Her Name" campaign, Roth well articulates that no matter how consistent this intellectual tradition has been, many black feminists have been rendered invisible, as if there is only room for a few luminaries at once. Simon Wendt analyzes black nationalist thought from the 1950s through the 1990s by paying attention to black "paraintellectuals," thinkers who reached larger audiences by speaking and writing about black politics from their lived rather than learned experiences (p. 171). This contribution highlights the predicaments and complexities of these thinkers, who attempted to create postcolonial ideologies that were inextricably linked to Anglo...

Engaging with teachers’ difficult knowledge, seeking moral repair: the entanglement of moral and peace education

ABSTRACTThe paper explores how might teacher educators engage with teachers’ difficult knowledge and negotiate competing moral truths, when this effort obviously fails to provide adequate ‘answers’ or ‘solutions’. Although the paper is theoretical, this question’s point of departure is an incident from a series of teacher workshops in Cyprus. The question is explored from the vantage of two thinkers, Deborah Britzman and Margaret Walker, who, in different ways, theorize the moral challenges of engaging with difficult knowledge in ways that disrupt stereotypical categories of victims and perpetrators. It is argued that drawing on Britzman and Walker offers a pedagogical theory in peace and moral education that is less about offering definitive answers and settling the questions of moral wrongdoing and more about ‘staying with the trouble’, that is, staying with difficulty for regenerating thinking around issues of morality and peace education. The paper concludes by suggesting under what conditions peace education may function as transformative moral education.

The Narrative Power of the Black Maternal Body: Resisting and Exceeding Visual Economies of Discipline in Margaret Walker'sJubilee

AbstractAs theorist Robyn Wiegman has established, specular, and panoptic disciplinary measures together served to maintain hegemonic systems of power in American slavery, the Reconstruction period, and the era of segregation. Specular discipline is characterized by public scenes of torture, which discourage acts of opposition to the dominant power structure, while panoptic discipline uses constant surveillance, both real and imagined, to cause subjects to internalize the order of the discipline. In this article, I argue that Jubilee investigates and resists the visual control of the black maternal body in US slavery and Reconstruction, as these periods are depicted in the novel, as well as in the Civil Rights era contemporary to its publication. I focus on the changing narrative significance of the black maternal body in Jubilee as the protagonist carves out space within a disciplinary system of ocular control to claim ownership of her black maternal body and tell her story. I claim that the novel positions the black mother as uniquely able to subvert the narrative power enforced by the gaze throughout the past several centuries and counters stereotypical discourses about black women with an account of the strength and survival of the black female body.

For My People

When Margaret Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, she stood at the forefront of a nascent Black studies movement. At the time, she had served on the faculty at Jackson State College since 1949. In both a racist and a sexist society, she used her scholarship and art as vehicles for activism. Today, the Margaret Walker Center, named for its founder, continues to lift up her legacy as a museum and special collections archive dedicated to Black experience in America.

Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt, editors. Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective.

Journal Article Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt, editors. Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. Get access Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt, editors. Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. vi, 244. $65.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 2, April 2018, Page 675, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.2.675a Published: 02 April 2018

Cultures on tour: the roots and routes of a British museum exhibition on Assam

The 2016 British Museum 'Krishna in the Garden of Assam' exhibition was built around a nine-metre textile embellished with Hindu iconography known as the Vrindavani Vastra. As part of the exhibition programming, the museum hosted a 90-minute performance by eleven monks and artistes from northeast India, entitled Vrindavani Paal. This article analyses these two cultural productions - the textile and the dance - in relation to narratives of 'home'. Whilst both are represented as being 'from Assam' by museum narratives and in the literature surrounding Indian classical dance respectively, a close look at their histories and forms reveals a far more complex relationship to this northeast Indian state than is usually acknowledged. Bringing together diaspora theory of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, and post-colonial dance scholarship by Margaret Walker and Davesh Soneji, the article de-constructs the narratives surrounding these 'Assamese' arts and examines the stories of travel and translation which have produced their current forms.1 It explains how these stories are visibly manifest in the textile and the dance, and questions why such stories are side-lined in favour of originating myths.

Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory ed. by Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory ed. by Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson Noël K. Wolfe Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory. Ed. Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-50832-0. 296 pp., paper, $27.95. In January 1977, ABC aired a television miniseries based on Alex Haley's book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. For eight consecutive nights, more than 130 million Americans tuned in to follow the life of Kunta Kinte, beginning in his West African village, continuing with the Middle Passage, and through his and his descendants' enslavement. The show refuted racist stereotypes about enslaved people; they were not happy or content, they were brutalized and yet they resisted and formed families. Given the critical acclaim and impact on popular culture, one would expect Roots to be regularly analyzed in academia. Yet, as editors Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson explain, the miniseries and book have mostly been overlooked due to a number of controversies surrounding the book's content. Ball and Jackson convincingly argue that Roots deserves a reconsideration because of its significant cultural and political contributions. They explain that in the 1970s, Roots provided a relatable and generic "American [End Page 228] story" for white Americans who wanted to celebrate their immigrant past and a "deeply personal" and "collective family history" for black Americans (8). Divided into three parts, the collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the tensions and contrasts within and about Roots, examines audiences' reception to the miniseries, and offers a critical examination of gender, politics, and the impact of the Roots phenomenon. In part 1, Clare Corbould analyzes reaction letters from "ordinary Americans" and shows that while many white viewers reacted positively to the show, only African American letter-writers used language such as "racism" and "discrimination" to explain the legacies of slavery. Tyler D. Parry examines Margaret Walker's plagiarism lawsuit against Alex Haley. Parry deftly explores how Walker's gender, race, and refusal to submit to Hollywood's whitewashed and exploitive nature negatively affected her case. Francesca Morgan demonstrates that Roots was part of a larger tradition of black genealogy that was ripe for expansion in the 1970s because of changes in historical methodology. In part 2, the authors examine the miniseries and its sequel through the lenses of masculinity, labor struggles, the impact of the white gaze on storytelling, and the black military image. Delia Mellis shows that in Roots white masculinity was exhibited through violence and black masculinity was defined as survival and forbearance. She argues that these constructions worked to undermine black power ideology. Elise Chatelain compares the depictions of African American labor in the miniseries Roots and Backstairs at the Whitehouse. While both works reflect black servitude, Chatelain contends that storytelling from an African American perspective demanded recognition of discriminatory racial hierarchies. C. Richard King and David J. Leonard contend that Roots and Django Unchained are ultimately limited in their ability to address larger systemic oppression, because they are concerned with cultivating a white audience. Robert K. Chester examines the portrayal of black military members in Roots: The Next Generations. Chester contrasts the ideas of racial triumphalism abroad during World War II and the discrimination and violence that black military men faced at home. Part 3 highlights Roots' impact on transnational conversations and movements for freedom. Martin Stollery demonstrates that while British mainstream media viewed Roots as an American phenomena and an opportunity to celebrate British abolitionism, black British people related to Roots based on their experiences in Britain and as part of a global black history. Similarly, Norvella Carter, Warren Chalklen, and Bhekuyise Zungu explore how Roots was linked to larger anticolonialism and antiapartheid struggles in South Africa. Dominic [End Page 229] Meng-Hsuan Yang details the personal and political impact of Roots on a retired military officer in Taiwan, who had been abducted from China at age fourteen. The editors of Reconsidering Roots have compiled a thoughtful and critical examination of Roots and its legacies. Whether challenging the compromises made to satisfy the white gaze or exploring how Roots was linked to the growing trend of...

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

Climate Change and the Need for Intergenerational Reparative Justice

Environmental philosophies concerning our obligations to each other and the natural world too rarely address the aftermath of environmental injustice. Ideally we would never do each other wrong; given that we do, as fallible and imperfect agents, we require non-ideal ethical guidance. Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and Annette Baier’s work on cross-generational communality together provide useful hermeneutical tools for understanding and enacting meaningful responses to intergenerational injustice, and in particular, for anthropogenic climate change. By blending Baier’s cross-generational approach with Walker’s emphasis on victim subjectivity and moral repair, I propose that a reparative model of intergenerational justice can provide some much needed direction on non-ideal moral issues comparatively neglected in climate-ethics debates today.

Sister Act: Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty

Sister Act: Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty

Treating Moral Harm as Social Harm: Toward a Restorative Ethics of Christian Responsibility

This essay explores small ordinary experiences of moral harm as problems of social injustice. Starting with two stories, we first argue against a dominant framework of personal responsibility that assigns responsibility to particular blameworthy agents. Instead we sketch an account of why structural responsibility for social harm must be considered, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, drawing on Margaret Walker's notion of moral repair and Christopher Marshall's interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we sketch an account of Christian moral responsibility grounded in restorative justice that seeks to address daily experiences of moral harm through the moral repair work of neighbor-love.

Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez

Best known as a poet and playwright, Sonia Sanchez has also written short stories, children's books, critical essays, and columns for various periodicals. Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1934, the daughter of Wilson L. Driver and Lena Jones Driver. Her bachelor of arts degree is from Hunter College, and she did graduate work at New York University. Wilberforce University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1972. Divorced from Albert Sanchez, she has three children: Anita, Morani Neusi, and Mungu Neusi. Sanchez's academic as well as literary career has been a long and distinguished one. She was a staff member at the Downtown School in New York from 1965 to 1967, an instructor at San Francisco State College from 1966 to 1968, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1969 to 1970, an assistant professor at Rutgers University from 1970 to 1971, an assistant professor at Manhattan Community College from 1971 to 1973, and an associate professor at Amherst College and at the University of Pennsylvania. At present, she teaches at Temple University, where she is Laura H. Carnell Professor of English. She has also been a Distinguished Minority Fellow at the University of Delaware, Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Spelman College, and Zale Writer in Residence at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University. The list of honors Sanchez has collected is equally long and impressive: a PEN Writing Award in 1969; a National Institute of the Arts and Letters grant in 1970; a National Endowment for the Arts Award for 1978-1979; a Tribute to Black Women Award from the Black Students of Smith College in 1982; a Lucre tia Mott Award in 1984; an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1985; an International Women's Award from the Mayor's Commission for Women of Philadelphia in 1987; a Welcome Award from Boston's Museum of Afro-American History in 1990; an Oni Award from the International Black Women's Congress in 1992; a Women Pioneers Hall of Fame Citation from the Young Women's Christian Association, also in 1992; a Roots Award from the Pan-African Studies Community Education Program in 1993; a PEN fellowship in the arts for 1993-1994; and a Legacy Award from Jomandi Productions in 1995. She is an Honorary Citizen of Atlanta, Georgia. Among Sanchez's books of poetry are Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973), I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), and Does Your House Have Lions (1995). For Folkways Records she did an album in 1971, A Sun Lady for All Seasons Reads Her Poetry. Her children's books include It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971); The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973); and A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979). She has edited Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin' at You (1971) and We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans (1973). Her plays are The Bronx is Next (1970); Sister Son/ji (1972); Dirty Hearts (1973); Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1975); Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No More (1979); I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982); and Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995). She has contributed to numerous anthologies. Sanchez and I spoke on an evening when she was, by her own admission, exhausted, worried, and sad: She had recently returned from a trip to New York to care for her ailing father, and was preparing to visit writer Margaret Walker, whom she had just learned was dying of the cancer that had invaded her brain and robbed her of speech. Kelly: What moved you to begin writing? Sanchez: I began writing when I was a little girl, after my grandmother died and I began stuttering and being tongue-tied. …

The “Meta” Level of Integrity: Integrity in the Context of Structural Injustice

This essay argues for a new, “meta,” level of integrity that is created by the context of structural injustice. The essay will draw from Margaret Walker to bring out a defining social value of integrity, namely, its ability to facilitate reliable response to harms caused by “moral luck.” The essay will then argue that, when bad luck is caused by complex social‐structural function, traditional advice for maintaining one's integrity fails to provide adequate guidance; following such advice facilitates unjust social‐structural function, and so unreliability in response to harm. The essay will address this problem by arguing that in the context of structural injustice, a “meta‐level” meaning of integrity emerges. This new meta‐level of integrity, unlike the more traditional first‐level integrity, does not instruct an individual to disassociate herself from structural harms; instead, it instructs an individual to manage the way in which she participates in unjust social structures. Meta‐level integrity, unlike first‐level integrity, does not facilitate an end to structural harm, but it does promote a reliable presence of social‐justice movements within unjust structures.

The Greatest Art is the Greatest Propaganda: The Fascinating and Tragic Life of Margaret Walker Alexander

In 1949, the famed author and poet Margaret Walker took a position of employment with the English Department at Jackson State University, an appointment that she would hold for the next 30 years. Her tenure at Jackson State coincided with the rise of the Modern Civil Rights Movement and her diary entries during these turbulent years illustrate a woman in flux and tragically silenced as the black freedom struggle unfolded. This article discusses Walker's dilemma as it related to feeling voiceless in Mississippi's closed society but it also examines the ways in which Walker molded her students and in doing so, made contributions to their politicization and development as change agents. Walker's career would become a source of inspiration for later artists and writers of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements.

To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools ed. by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale

Reviewed by: To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools ed. by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale Erin Krutko Devlin To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools. Edited by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Pp. [viii], 220. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-62846-188-6.) To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools is an edited volume of primary source material drawn from Freedom School newspapers produced during Freedom Summer in 1964. Editors William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale have gathered articles, essays, and poems written by Freedom Summer students in eleven communities across Mississippi. The text provides students, teachers, and scholars with access to a collection of sources that have invaluable insights about local [End Page 482] civil rights campaigns as viewed from the perspective of Freedom Summer students themselves. An introduction grounds the collection in the long grassroots struggle to gain access to educational opportunity and equity in the state of Mississippi. Sturkey and Hale also emphasize the connection between education and social activism in the black freedom struggle by tracing the influence of the Highlander Folk School and the Citizenship Schools initiative. The editors highlight the pedagogical intentions of Freedom School organizers, connecting those intentions to this project by noting the central importance “of expressive critical thinking” in the educational curriculum offered to students (p. 32). Student newspapers provided Freedom School students with an outlet to develop writing skills and to share and assimilate knowledge gained about African American history, culture, and literature emphasized in other parts of the curriculum. Students used the newspapers to develop a critique of systemic racism in Mississippi and to commit themselves to movement activism. The excerpts provided from the newspapers provide insight into “the intellectual liberation” of students as expressed in their own words (p. 45). To Write in the Light of Freedom is organized into chapters focused on a particular Freedom School publication and presented in alphabetical order by community of origin. Each chapter is prefaced with a brief description of local community organizing, includes editorial notes on the unique strengths and features of individual newspapers, and contains student work from one or more issues of the publication. This book would be more useful as a research resource if the archival locations of specific newspapers and issues were provided. The editors note that the materials gathered in the collection were located in a wide range of repositories, but the transcribed materials contained in the text are not annotated. Nevertheless, this unprecedented collection of primary source materials from the Freedom School newspapers will be a powerful teaching tool, particularly for high school and college students. As the editors note, the book “offers contemporary youths a unique opportunity to learn about the Civil Rights Movement from the perspectives of people their own age and connect it to their lives today” (p. 46). Erin Krutko Devlin University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

A Collection Remembered

Before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (we call it “The Storm” in New Orleans), I relished collecting manuscripts, books, and magazines. The historian/poet Julius E. Thompson and I joked about our passion for books, congratulating ourselves that between us we had at least eighty percent of the African American poetry broadsides, chapbooks, volumes, and anthologies published since 1960. We were assiduous in buying the output of Broadside, Third World, and Lotus Presses; in having complete collections of Negro Digest / Black World, OBSIDIAN, Sagala, American Rag, First World, Callaloo, Hoo-Doo, Drumvoices Revue, Umbra, and The Black Scholar; and in treasuring our autographed books by Margaret Walker, Richard A. Long, Haki Madhubuti, Angela Jackson, Mari Evans, Sterling A. Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Kalamu ya Salaam, Tom Dent, Kiarri T-H. Cheatwood, Sterling D. Plumpp, Lance Jeffers, Harryette Mullen, Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, Michael Harper, Julia Fields, Carolyn Rodgers, LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Etheridge Knight, and such Mississippi writers as L. C. Dorsey, C. Leigh McInnis, Theodore Bozeman, Charlie Braxton, David Brian Williams, and Otis Williams. I tried to buy all the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker published and all the recordings of Cassandra Wilson, Isaac Hayes, and Esther Phillips. Julius bought hundreds of books on African American and Southern history. The two of us were like kids in the candy factory with regard to all the reprints of black materials during the 1970s. Collecting was more than a simple matter of acquisition. It had practical uses. Having an extensive collection at hand made it easier to co-edit Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (1992) with John Oliver Killens, to compile Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997), to write literary criticism, and to share insights about black literature and culture with my students at Tougaloo College and Dillard University. Julius used his collection to write important books on Dudley Randall and Broadside Press, lynching in Mississippi, and

Healing traditions in Black women's writing: Resources for poetry therapy

“Healing Traditions” identifies 54 Black women writers whose memoirs, poetry, and song lyrics provide resources for mental health practice in general and bibliotherapy in particular. Evans locates issues relevant to Black women’s perspectives, highlights themes found in leading artists’ work, and offers an in-depth poetry curriculum for creative approaches to empowerment. In this article, readers find three extensive lists of culturally relevant resources and learn keywords in memoirs, poems, and songs. Writers presented—named “Revolutionary Petunias” after Alice Walker’s poem—are a diverse group, including Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (President of Liberia), Jan Willis (Buddhist religion professor), Stacy Ann Chin (Chinese-Jamaican poet), Nina Simone (legendary songstress), and Mary J. Blige (songwriter of complex emotion). After an overview of resources, Evans then provides case studies of five Southern Black women poets and recommends 25 poems that address “hurt, healing, and hope.” She suggests how close readings of work by five poets (Margaret Walker, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker) can help mentors and practitioners identify restorative themes during individual and group writing sessions. Evans defines balance as a “harmony between forces” and identifies equilibrium as a cornerstone issue in Black women’s lives. In sum, Evans reflects on her personal journey as a survivor of sexual violence and how a decade of teaching race and gender culminated in development of a curriculum of creative nonfiction for healing through poetry.

Black Masculinity and Plantation Patriarchy in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee

In Jubilee, Margaret Walker depicts plantation patriarchy as a racial and gendered context that coerces black men to redefine their masculine conceptualizations. The fictitious slave plantation represents the system which commodifies and divides black people “into those with skills [...], field hands, ‘breeding females,’ concubines, and children” (Nichols 1972, p. 10). This portrayal of slave plantation is congruent with historically documented circumstances, when “Much of [the slave] labor was gender- or age- specific” (Ash 2010, p. 20). As far as the position of black men is concerned, ascribed a subordinate status to that of white masters, overseers, and servants, both free and enslaved black men begin to imbibe patriarchal mindset and redefine their own masculine prowess. As Margaret Walker portrays, this response to oppressive plantation patriarchy effects multifarious black male postures, ranging from resisting and self-asserting warriors to humiliated and silenced victims.