Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching: Early Black Christian Women's Lives Matter - Paperback

by April C. E. Langley (Author), Melba Joyce Boyd (Editor)

Back Jacket

Through the legacies of early Black Christian women writers and preachers, this book explores the foundational ways in which faith, poetics, and spirituality have shaped Black social justice movements in the United States. April C. E. Langley employs Afrofuturist and Sankofic lenses to provide a dynamic close reading of three foremothers of modern Black women's social justice movements: Phillis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, and Jarena Lee. In repoliticizing their work, Langley highlights the resistance strategies that emerge from using religion as a means for imagination and potential liberation--a legacy whose threads run through today's era of social justice movements and activism. This timely examination of early Black Christian women and their writing reminds us of the importance of retrieving what is lost to understand where we are and where we are going.

Author Biography

April C. E. Langley is associate professor and chair of African American studies at the University of South Carolina and associate professor emerita of English and Black studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is author of The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature.