Ntozake Shange Research Articles

“¡¡¡SOY NEGRA!!!”/“i found god in myself”: Shange, Santa Cruz, and Self-Love as Savior

In this article, I assert that Ntozake Shange and Victoria Santa Cruz engage in a “diasporic dialogue” through their dramatic poetry—a dialogue that transcends genre, language, form, and geographies. I believe they do so not through the actual exchange of words, but rather through the Afro-diasporic aesthetics and Black Feminist messaging at the heart of their respective works: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and “Me Gritaron Negra.” I am invested in the conversation between their pieces—and the consciousness transformation such a conversation allows. By placing these works in conference for the first time and investigating the ways they “talk” to each other, I seek to demonstrate the unique vitality of theatre pieces—especially those led by Black women from across the African Diaspora—as embodied practices of liberatory politics and the transforming (and transformational) Black Feminist thought of the 1970s. Furthermore, by honing in on and getting up close to praxes and articulations of self-acceptance, self-definition, and self-determination in both Shange’s and Santa Cruz’s works, I will demonstrate the usefulness of this kind of embodied performance to something we might think of as the radical political potential of self-love.

Bag Lady: A Soulful and Scientific Reflection on Black Women's Health.

At the intersection of sexism and racism, Black women experience undue burden of poor health. Established literature in both scientific and artistic arenas archive health disparities facing Black women such as mental health and suicidality. Using poetry, this piece serves as a channel to express the joys and pains of the human experience as well as inspire healing and synergy through honest examination of societal structures. This mixed media artistry (intended to be sung and spoken) weaves together lyrical and literary works, featuring by quotes from Erykah Badu's Bag Lady; Dr. Maya Angelou's many works; Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf; and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. It ultimately articulates how to journey across the arc of triumph for well-being synergizing mind, body, and spirit.

Virtual Erasure: Ntozake Shange, Black Spaces, Wealth, and Children’s Biographies

In “‘The White Space’”, sociologist Elijah Anderson notes that, despite some integration post- Brown v. Board of Education, certain public areas continue to be perceived as ‘white spaces’. Conversely, Black spaces, largely due to media portrayals, are identified as the ghetto. This article explores how Ntozake Shange’s children’s biographies combat such limited characterisations and teach lessons that oppose notions of Black spaces as ghettoes.

Lest We Forget Black Patriarchy; or, Why I'm Over Calling Out White Women

This article contends that present-day focus of Black feminist anger at white women obscures the old and ongoing Black feminist struggle to name and diagnose Black patriarchy. In effort to redirect attention to the sexual/gendered intramural struggles within Black social life, this article reads selected texts by the Combahee River Collective, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks from the 1970s–1980s. Doing so illustrates the long tradition of Black feminist writing filled with rage –not at white women—but at Black men and with the expressed objective to eradicate patriarchy. Remembering these Black feminist analytic and activist efforts to challenge black women's sexual oppression reframes Black feminism as a singular project that calls out white women's racism to a broader liberatory one requiring confrontation with male power writ large and, in particular, Black male violence against Black women.

The Black Anterior

The Black Anterior Erica R. Edwards (bio) Near the beginning of Ntozake Shange's 1974 classic Black feminist choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the lady in yellow remembers coming of age in a Buick on the night of her high school graduation. Colored "deep black," the Buick becomes a scene of too much pleasure: more people than seem possible crowd into the car—a young girl plus five pretty boys, all cousins—the young graduate sweats her hair out at the dance and, back in the car afterward, makes love for the first time. The Buick, conjured in memory, aids the feet and hips of the performers onstage in setting the choreopoem in constant motion against Black stasis. The soundtrack for this scene, powered by the lady in yellow and her slightly mocking compatriots in orange and blue, who sing backup, is the Dells' "Stay in My Corner." And more miracle than the layin' on of hands that ends the choreopoem is this: the Buick reaches its destination without event, and its Black inhabitants are even afforded the luxury of aging: "WE WAZ GROWN WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN," says the lady in yellow, and even if that bold assertion belies a youthful bravado, the past tense waz reminds us that the lady in yellow has indeed achieved the maturity of a grown-ass woman reflecting on the night she "gave it up in a buick." Sometime between Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" and the Dells' "Stay in My Corner," some womanish stuff happens. And by the time the sun comes up, the girl-woman rolling her hips in the back seat "cdnt stop grinnin."1 Shana Redmond's 2022 presidential address, "The Dark Prelude," teaches us to hear in detail scenes like this—scenes of motoring, listening, enjoying, coming, and coming through in deep black—where to hear in detail is to grieve in detail the lives these scenes index and, in so doing, to place ourselves in the way of Black culture's metronome of aliveness. But it teaches through its multimedia form: it must be heard, and it must be heard in concert. The address insists that if we listen for the interiors of Black vehicularity—which is to say, the Black anteriors that surface through the comingling of black automotive and audio technologies—we might hear well enough to be overcome by Black study's ethical excess. Our work might be overtaken, that is, not by the [End Page 219] thick description of telling the world as it is but by what Redmond refers to as the "thick emotion" of Black study's grief and what she refers to elsewhere as the "thick camaraderie" that counters the "thin bonds of sympathy" tying well-meaning liberals to dark subjects whose deaths serve as the precondition of white life.2 Redmond begins with this overstanding and overtaking: "I cry a lot," she confesses. The setting for "The Dark Prelude" is, indeed, the thick Black anterior, where what comes and lies before the black death that preconditions white life—what is in advance of and surrounds this black deathliness—is held and holding, and beheld and beholding. The Black anterior is what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to as "the black before and before," "the already and the forthcoming": Consider the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, first theorists of the revolution of the surround, the black before and before, the already and the forthcoming. Their twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innovation. This is not a contradiction if the new thing, always calling for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations, the patrolled highways and the prison towers.3 If Blackness is the constantly improvised mode of commoning and communing that is anterior to the carceral apparatuses mounted to harness and control it, Blackness is the antagonism to enclosure, to, even, racial Blackness. And if what we, students of the Black anterior, bring to American studies is a refusal of "America" and its...

Potus by Selina Fillinger, and: For Colored Girls … by Ntozake Shange (review)

Reviewed by: Potus by Selina Fillinger, and: For Colored Girls … by Ntozake Shange Sonja Arsham Kuftinec POTUS. By Selina Fillinger. Directed by Susan Stroman. Shubert Theatre, New York. May 7, 2022. for COLORED GIRLS… By Ntozake Shange. Directed and Choreographed by Camille A. Brown. Booth Theatre, New York. May 8, 2022. How does feminism perform on Broadway in the wake of Covid cautions, Supreme Court throw-downs, and challenges to “White American Theatre?” Two plays staged in neighboring theatres [End Page 89] offer some insights: the premiere of 28-year-old Selina Fillinger’s comedy POTUS, or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and a revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Both productions featured seven-woman ensembles helmed by Tony-nominated director-choreographers. But where POTUS worked within the conventions of farce to critique the narcissistic and obtuse dimensions of presidential power and illuminate its less visible networks of female support, for colored girls reanimated a radical-spirituality-infused poetics that centered Black and brown women’s bodies supporting each other. Click for larger view View full resolution POTUS cast featuring (left to right) Vanessa Williams (Margaret), (Chris) Lili Cooper, Rachel Dratch (Stephanie), Julie White (Harriet), Julianna Hough (Dusty), and Suzy Nakamura (Jean). Photo: Paul Kolnik. The Shubert production of POTUS connected to a Girl Boss energy in which “Bitch” playlists and power poses both animated and punctured the idea of empowerment. Mask requirements for audiences could not stifle the exuberance prompted by preshow pop songs featuring Annie Lennox and Pat Benatar, establishing a sonically energetic rather than visually specific orientation to the production. The curtain then rose on a White House setting (delightfully designed by Beowulf Boritt) that felt masculine and patriarchal: heavy wooden furniture and gold drapes flanked by portraits of a uniformed General Eisenhower and Roosevelt Rough Riders on dusty horseback. Executive power represented as sturdy warrior energy. Press Secretary Jean (Suzy Nakamura) punctured that energy linguistically with a four-letter word for female anatomy—launching the play’s action through a high-stakes exchange with harried Chief of Staff Harriet (a sneaker-clad Julie White). The linguistic transgression also set in motion one of many crisis-driven plot points. In this case, the President had publicly used the derogatory term to reference First Lady Margaret (a gutsy stiletto-Croc-clad Vanessa Williams). Opening the play with a shocking slur also launched a dynamic of rule-bending within the rule-keeping conventions of farce: bawdy bodies breaking boundaries of restraint while ultimately sustaining the status quo. And Fillinger’s script crafts these women’s bodies as excessive. They leak breast milk in the Press Room (Lilli Cooper’s Chris, a journalist hunting for a scoop), smuggle drugs into the White House (Lea Delaria’s deliciously grungy Bernadette, the President’s sister), and vomit blue slushies into a vase (Julianne Hough’s Dusty, the President’s pregnant girlfriend). In the most memorable sustained performance of excess, former SNL star Rachel Dratch’s buttoned-up secretary character, Stephanie, lets loose after consuming hallucinogenic pills she [End Page 90] thought were Tums. The accidental ingestion led to a second act unraveling that concluded with a bloodied Stephanie surfing scenes in a pink plastic pool ring, clad only in granny panties, silken tank top, and Post-It notes. This liberatory energy of excess pressed against a dramaturgy of containment—of crises, secrets and gaffes, as well as pregnant, criminal, and possibly dead bodies. The plot also details the daily labor of propping up this unnamed POTUS “dumbass.” As Harriet intones, “Today began with calling his wife ‘cunty’ while in the Diplomatic Room.” Indeed, as the women’s capacity for problem-solving unfolded several characters remarked to others, “You should be president!” An intriguing dynamic emerged with the production illuminating the hidden details of manipulated narratives required to prop up this problematic president. The private becomes public and support figures take center stage. At the same time, even characters who function as agents of chaos emerge as savvier than they at first appeared. Defined initially by her status as the pregnant, rural, slushy...

Consort of the Spirits

Abstract Drawing inspiration from the 1982 novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange, the poem “Consort of the Spirits” celebrates the legacy of Black womanhood, ancestry, and resilience. The opening lines of Shange’s novel read: “Where there is a woman there is magic.” This phrase serves as the entry point for framing womanhood, specifically Black womanhood, as something extraordinary. In tribute, “Consort of the Spirits” guides readers on a journey through time and memory, depicting the tangible yet magical ways in which lineages of Black women have carried tools for their survival, protected their shared histories, and guided their descendants on a path toward a more liberated future.

Guest Editors’ Introduction—Visionary Praxis: Paule Marshall’s, Ntozake Shange’s, and Toni Morrison’s Foresight concerning Sick Violence and Violent Sickness

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue that focuses on the interconnections of Black women’s literary studies with the crises of COVID-19 and ongoing anti-Black violence. More specifically, it considers how the work of three renowned writers, Paule Marshall, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison—which collectively spans over fifty years—offers models for how to reimagine our current circumstances and create more just futures in our national and global communities. The essay identifies and expounds on the overarching question of the special issue: how does the work of Marshall, Shange, and Morrison speak to contemporary affairs and concerns? By engaging this question, this collection of essays offers new insights about these women’s writing in particular and expands the corpus of scholarship on Black women’s writing in general. In the aftermath of the passing of these writers, a collective reappraisal of their oeuvres is a timely and fitting tribute, as each of their bodies of work reveals that they long have engaged concerns about Black people’s encounters with systemic barriers that have laid the foundation for the current twinned crises of anti-Black violence and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19.

“this is my space / I am not movin”

ABSTRACT Throughout their literary careers, Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange used poetry as a vehicle to address the prevalent social ills that affected the African American community during their time. In particular, they were concerned with the threat of the recolonization of Black spaces (minds, bodies, and/or physical territories) by white leaders in Jim Crow society. Tracing the ways in which their poetry not only archives the oppression of the Jim Crow era but resists it enables us to understand the resounding impact that Hughes and Shange alike have had on transforming the image of Black Americans in the US cultural imagination even today. This article therefore probes key works by these two literary lights in order to trace the thread of progressive activism in their works, their response to the threat of recolonization, and their representation of the beauty of Blackness as both a social and political act.

“A Consort of the Spirits” or How to Cultivate Indigo, Conjured by Herself

ABSTRACT This foreword is a personal essay in which I reflect on the other ways of knowing and the African spiritual cosmologies that were first introduced to me through Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo (1982). I walk readers through the quarter-century love affair I have had with black women writers and Shange, in particular. I share memories of my only meeting with the author and discuss the profound impact her novel has had on both my professional and spiritual journeys. The article engages in black narrative practices of multivocality, culture bearing, vernacular language, and conjuring moments. The testimony herein involves a powerful Ifá priestess who moonlights as an English professor, a creole-speaking ancestral spirit, and the deep cultural legacy of indigo (and Indigo). It is a story told in celebration and honor of Ntozake Shange’s creative, conjuring genius.

Interview with Ntozake Shange

ABSTRACT An intimate interview with Ntozake Shange, the conversation was a Black Feminist history lesson, an artist manifesto, a 70s-era testimonial, a sentimental conversation about new beginnings, and lessons about working through personal limitations.

Dear ’Zake: In Appreciation

ABSTRACT This article is a poetic tribute to Ntozake Shange as well as an appreciative, celebratory analysis (or presentation) of some major aspects of her poetry.

Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash

Reviewed by: Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash Brenna M. Casey Jennifer Nash.Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 184 pp. $23.95. When Jennifer Nash returns to the state at the conclusion of her potent Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, it feels, as she notes: “risky” (117). “Against the grain of the moment,” writes Nash, hailing the state’s diurnal renewal of anti-Black violence, “I suggest that the juridical might be precisely where black feminists need to root our loving practice” (115). Beyond mere redress, Nash advocates an orientation to radical politics that dispenses with a presumptive antistate imperative. “What if the disavowed deathly archive of law is reimagined as a home for black feminism’s loving practice?” (113). Nash’s project throughout the book is to excavate the “largely forgotten connections” of law to the ubiquitous sign of intersectionality—a Black feminist theoretic that has come to frame shorthand considerations of the interlocking structures of domination (114). The term’s most frequently cited source is legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s exacta box of articles, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991), in which a metaphorical traffic intersection is deployed as an analogue for US antidiscrimination law that submits Black women to converging biases. From these coordinates, Nash produces an intellectual history of the term’s evolution and attendant applications. Citing figures like Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Beale, and the Combahee River Collective, Nash reveals the durational warp and weft of Black feminist intellectual labor. Rather than positioning intersectionality as a singular emergence, Nash reveals it as part of a “cohort of terms” that multivocal Black feminists have long cultivated for a sophisticated analysis of oppression’s interconnected mechanizations (6). While Nash acknowledges its mainstream migrations—untethered from the analytic’s history—it is with intersectionality’s atonic institutional life that Black Feminism Reimagined is most concerned. Nash identifies intersectionality as the primary program-building initiative of women’s studies, which has rendered it as a disciplinary corrective to a racist and wholly gender-focused field, but often as an implicit equivalency with Black feminism, Black feminists, and “the body that haunts the analytic,” Black women (2). This positions Black feminists as salvific “disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into shape” on the one hand, and heavies who usher in the demise of a fictitiously coherent field on the other (13). Nash reflects on intersectionality’s co-optation by the neoliberal university’s “diversity and inclusion complex,” where equity initiatives shift inclusion from remedial affirmative action ideals to the logic of students of color offering pedagogical value-added for an increasingly global white work force (22). She analyzes the freighted deployments of “intersectional scholar” ads in the ever-diminishing [End Page 95] academic job market and pulses the term’s nefarious liaisons with “interdisciplinary” labor. Highly mobile, adaptable, “filled with promise and emptied of specific meaning” (2), intersectionality has been claimed by various and vying factions of the academy. The book traces the frustration, territoriality, and exhaustion that adhere to these migrations of a term constituted by Black feminism—a tradition whose ideas and actors have long been abused, disavowed, and erased by the academy. Nash diagnoses these imbricated feelings as “a posture of defensiveness.” One compelling illustration is of a conference panelist who quotes Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf while ruminating on intersectionality’s institutional promiscuity: “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff.” Nash’s recognizes this sense of possession and loss as the Black feminist affect that appends to intersectionality’s circulations. “What does it mean,” Nash queries, “when an anticaptivity project like black feminist theory claims ownership as a primary model for conducting black feminist inquiry?” (26). As critic and acolyte, Nash plumbs “the felt life of black feminism” (28). She charts “the intersectionality wars”—the discursive, political, and theoretical battles that seem to be waged over intersectionality’s vexed origin stories, appropriations, and criticisms. These persuasive narratives suggest that intersectionality requires a robust defense from usurpers and critics, and demands scholars to position themselves as either for or against the...

“Dontcha Wanna Boogie Woogie”

ABSTRACT Building upon Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s theory of the choreopoem as a queer form emphasizing a poetics of difference, as well as Omi Osun Jones’s concept of theatrical jazz, this article reassesses Ntozake Shange’s boogie woogie landscapes to argue that the choreopoem serves as an embodied futurist solution for resolving cisgender bias, as well as femme phobia and transphobia in theater, film, and television casting and performance training.

A Praisesong for Ntozake Shange

shange. you break me into pieces.chartreuse, purple, and blue shotthrough with all the blood markingus as women and kin.shange. you danced on the beveled,sharp edge of art and found usbetween slashes and more than enuf.shange. you were a prayer caughtbetween sequins, Eric Dolphy,incense, Egyptian Musk, and allthe secrets we never gave toanyone who wasn’t us.shange. you were a conjurebetween the thighs, a hallelujahcaught in the throat, and an amenthreaded in our teeth.shange. you were headwrapto protect and celebrate ourdivine denied by everyone whoattempted to dismiss god in us.shange. you were the samplingof hot sex, a square of cornbread,and plants we refused to water.shange. you gave us permission,a hug, the affirmation and head nodsince you did the damn thing beforewe ever thought it and you even setit to full-fledged choreography.

Violence, Ritual, and Vogue: Black Queer Feminist Praxis in Motion

Abstract As an unapologetically Black feminist artist, Ntozake Shange furthered the cause of black girl representation on Broadway stages with the 1976 debut of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange’s award-winning choreopoem eschews the masculinist liberation discourse of the Black Power era and instead centers the concerns of Black girls within the freedom struggle. Using twenty poems interlaced with dance and music, Shange illuminates the subjectivity of seven “colored girls” who experience sexual, emotional, and physical violence in their communities. Committed to the health and safety of the entire Black community, Shange concludes the performance with a ritual dance to foster unity and community healing from violence. Her early Black feminist intervention serves as a foundation for the artistic work of Black Lives Matter activists today, many of whom continue to use ritual performances to promote community healing in the wake of white-authored violence. Black Lives Matter movement artists and activists Gorgeous Mother Karma Gucci, Adonte Prodigy, and Amya Miyake-Mugler, for example, performed ritual Voguing at a Chicago demonstration on 3 June 2020 to bring greater visibility to the intracultural violence reaped upon Black queer and transgender girls. Their ritual Voguing, which I situate as Black queer feminist praxis in motion, reimagines the Black radical tradition as collective liberation. Collectively, the work of Shange, Gucci, Prodigy, and Mugler affirms the vital truth that none of us are free until all of us are free.

The Interlocking Matrix of Oppression: A Reading of the Nameless Women in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls and Dina Soliman’s Al-ʾArayis

The Interlocking Matrix of Oppression: A Reading of the Nameless Women in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls and Dina Soliman’s Al-ʾArayis

Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren

Reviewed by: Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren Le’mil L. Eiland Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance. By La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 376. La Donna Forsgren’s Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance is the first history to highlight Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, which explicitly melded artistic expression with Black racial pride during the 1960s and ’70s as a challenge to white supremacy in the United States. Historiography on the Black Arts Movement is often male-dominated with a genealogy crediting figures like Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal. Countering the logic that Black feminist drama was tangential to the movement, Sistuhs in the Struggles organizes a plethora of Black women artists to explain how they developed their Black aesthetics, nourished the racial politics of the Black Arts Movement, and advanced the genre of Black feminist drama. Centering these Black women’s artistic contributions, Forsgren offers a new perspective on the intertwining gender and race politics of the movement. Sans neat conclusions, Sistuhs in the Struggle examines the individual contributions of Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, their inspirations and accolades, and their methods for navigating sexism and racism. Forsgren’s project offers wonderful firsthand accounts of women in the Black Arts Movement and their legacies as their aesthetics informed various arenas of theatre and performance. In addition to providing a window into the movement, through these interviews Forsgren archives not only their aesthetic practices, but the politics that informed their work. She interviews a range of artists, some iconic like Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Micki Grant, and Jackie Taylor, and some lesser known like Dawn Alli and Nora Cole. What began as a project to include nineteen interviews expanded to include the contributions of their dearly departed sistuhs, such as founder of Harlem’s National Black Theatre Barbara Ann Teer, as interviewees acknowledged her contributions to theatre. Forsgren was wise in including Black women intellectuals working on and behind the stage. In particular, her interview with Kathy Perkins reveals how distinct gender and racial politics impacted her career in lighting design. Each of the four chapters includes edited fragments of interviews, but concludes to resemble a roundtable of familiar scholars or an intimate space where women of your family gather. Each chapter orbits around a distinct concept in an effort to expand the discussion of Black women’s artistic contributions to Black theatre and performance. Chapter 1, “Spiritual Sister: The Black Aesthetic, Feminism, and Black Power,” explores the melding of and, sometimes, tensions between Black art, feminism, and Black Power politics. Chapter 2, “Black Theaters Matter: The Art of Institution Building,” charts how institutions like the Harlem Children’s Theatre Company, the Black Ensemble Theatre of Chicago, and the National Black Theatre of Harlem advance Black theatre on a regional and national stage. Chapter 3, “‘Traveling with Ears to the Ground’: Black Arts Movement Drama, Ritual, Teleplays, and Musicals,” explores various women’s transition from playwrighting to writing for television and Broadway, off-Broadway, and musical theatre. Chapter 4, “Performative Embodiment on Black Arts and Alternative Stages,” provides a glimpse into artists’ performance practices in front of and behind the stage. Forsgren’s methodology intertwines Black feminist oral history with critical performance ethnography to interrogate the “relationship between the Black aesthetic, performance, and Black empowerment” (5). Building off Dwight Conquergood’s praxis of witnessing, Forsgren includes her own responses to and commentary on the interview process and reflections on how her presence shaped her respondents’ engagement and candidness. This project also illuminates how Black women artists developed their art in dialogue with one another. Forsgren intentionally arranges the interview transcripts so that she shows multiple perspectives on (and sometimes disagreements about) a single issue or event. For example, some women like Shange associate themselves with the feminist movement, whereas others such as Doris Derby intentionally distance themselves from [End Page 202] feminism and define themselves as “womanist.” This book highlights disagreements among the...

Depicting Hate: Picture Books and the Realities of White Supremacist Crime and Violence

Background/ContextSince the 2016 presidential election, hate-based speech, crime, and violence have been on the rise in the United States, (re)creating a need for adults to engage children in dialogue related to white supremacy as it exists today, instead of framing it as a problem that ended with the civil rights movement. Following an incident of racist vandalism at her home, the author of this article (a White mother) conducted a search for picture books that could serve as vehicles to discuss race-based hate and whiteness with children like her young Black son.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThis study draws upon Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Critical Multicultural Analysis to explore the emancipatory possibilities of literacy education. Given that children's literature has the potential to engage young readers in transactions that promote critical literacy, this study focuses on the following research questions: 1) To what extent do picture books set in a post-civil-rights era United States address explicit and physical acts of white supremacy or hate directed against Black people's bodies, families, or properties? 2) How might such picture books aid parents, educators, and other adults in their attempts to raise children's awareness about white supremacy/hate?Research DesignThe first part of this article, which documents the author's search for children's picture books about explicit and physical acts of white supremacy/hate, utilizes first person narrative. The second part of this article consists of a multimodal content analysis of five texts, all meeting the following criteria: 1) written and illustrated in picture book format, 2) include child characters, 3) set in the United States, 4) set in a post-civil-rights era, 5) include an incident of white supremacist crime or violence (a physical act directed toward a person or property), 6) depict/address an incident directed against a Black individual or group.Conclusions/RecommendationsFindings of this study point to the need for more picture books that challenge whiteness in its overt and covert forms, particularly in contemporary contexts, in order to provide children with opportunities to engage critically with current issues that have emerged in this heightened era of white supremacy and hate-based crime and violence. The picture books that do address white supremacy, in its current manifestation, tend to include stories about White police killing and shooting Black individuals and the protests that follow such incidents. Yet these stories, as well as one about an incident in which a group of White gang members physically attack two Black children (Ntozake Shange's Whitewash), are not equal in their level of explicitness about what occurs, their identifications of the White perpetrators involved in what happens, or their demonstrations of how the incidents are rooted in white supremacy. Accordingly, educators and other adults will often need to fill in significant “truth gaps” in order to raise children's social consciousness related to whiteness and racism. One of the primary recommendations presented in this piece is to accompany these picture books and picture books like them with discussion questions related to the stories that are and are not told in the texts, as well as to facilitate conversation with children related to power and agency as exhibited by the Black characters. Most important, educators and other adults should remain cognizant of the fact that, while books like the ones in this examination may help to address traumas and help facilitate testimony related to race-based hate, children should have opportunities to construct and express their own understandings of textual relevance on this topic.

„Judgemental Category‟ is the Major Concept in Ntozake Shange‟s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf”

This paper aims to explore the frequencies of using the Attitudinal resources in Shange‟s Postmodern American drama “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf”. The purpose of that investigation is to make a comparative analysis among all three types of Attitude categories which are: Appreciation, Judgment, and Affect. In order to accomplish the role of being the spokesperson of black American women in the United States of America by delivering the real agony and oppression that those people faced because of their class, gender, and race. The playwright has presented and cantered on seven black women who encountered some form of neglect, harassment, and abuse; either emotionally, sexually, or physically. The analysing process has presented that the playwright had utilized many linguistic resources; „Judgement‟. This category is considered as one of the major Attitudinal systems in the discourse-semantic appraisal mode within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for interpersonal meanings. Judgement is connected with the evaluation of black women‟s characters as well as their behaviours in this literary text. This article intends to discover the reason behind the heavy use of that category compared with the other two types of Attitudinal system. The paper has adopted qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct the objectives of the Attitudinal resources in the selected data sets. This paper has concluded that in the Attitude category, Judgement turned to be the most presentation system comparing with the other Attitudinal types which are Affect and Appreciation. Moreover, within the scope of Judgement „Propriety‟ and „Tenacity‟ have exceeded other judgmental subtypes.