The Souls of Womenfolk

The Souls of Womenfolk PDF Author: Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663619
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category. Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

The Souls of Womenfolk

The Souls of Womenfolk PDF Author: Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663619
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book

Book Description
Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category. Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

Women and Religion in the African Diaspora

Women and Religion in the African Diaspora PDF Author: R. Marie Griffith
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883699
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays explores how diverse women of African descent have practiced religion as part of the work of their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives. By examining women from North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa, the contributors identify the patterns that emerge as women, religion, and diaspora intersect, mapping fresh approaches to this emergent field of inquiry. The volume focuses on issues of history, tradition, and the authenticity of African-derived spiritual practices in a variety of contexts, including those where memories of suffering remain fresh and powerful. The contributors discuss matters of power and leadership and of religious expressions outside of institutional settings. The essays study women of Christian denominations, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Islam, addressing their roles as spiritual leaders, artists and musicians, preachers, and participants in bible-study groups. This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space.

Religion and the American West

Religion and the American West PDF Author: Jessica Lauren Nelson
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826365124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Religion and the American West offers a lavishly illustrated and comprehensive overview of the ways religion has shaped the idea of the American West and how the region has influenced broader religious and racial categories. Starting when the concept of the “American West” emerged in the early nineteenth century and continuing through modern times, Religion and the American West explores the interplay between a wide range of American belief systems, from established world religions to new spiritual innovations. A stunning selection of material and print culture illustrates the varied range of religious expressions across the history of the American West. Taken as a whole, the contributors challenge longstanding definitions of the American West and provide a new narrative that recenters our attention on the lived experiences of diverse peoples and communities. The book also serves as the companion publication for the New-York Historical Society’s traveling exhibition “Acts of Faith.” Religion and the American West is a story of vibrant innovation and tragic conflict, showcasing how historical actors and modern-day readers wrestle with the meaning of religious belief in the American West.

Constructing Mission History

Constructing Mission History PDF Author: Stanley H. Skreslet
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506481906
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Three master narratives currently dominate the analysis of modern mission history.?One puts foreign missionaries at the heart of the story.?A second emphasizes the colonial aspect of modern missions.?Here, missionaries are not heroes but villains, who are implicated in hegemonic schemes of imperial domination.?Thirdly, mission history is subordinated to one of its outcomes, the advent of World Christianity.?In this master narrative, the concept of contextualization looms large, bolstered by Sanneh's notion of translatability and emphasis on the agency of non-Westerners, who participate in and subtly shape the complex social processes of evangelization.?While all three of these master narratives are insightful, none of them adequately balances concern for missionary initiative and indigenous agency.?? Borrowing from speech-act theory, Skreslet offers a new analytical approach to the modern roots of World Christianity that differentiates between what a speaker might intend to communicate and the effects of what has been said or actions taken both in the moment and over time.?Corresponding to the concepts of illocution and perlocution as these technical terms are used in speech-act theory, the book is structured in two main sections.?Initially, the focus is on expressed missionary motives. Part two engages a representative set of modern-era mission performances involving many more actors than just the foreign evangelizers whose stated or implied intentions are emphasized in part one.

More Than Chattel

More Than Chattel PDF Author: David Barry Gaspar
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253013658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Essays exploring Black women’s experiences with slavery in the Americas. Gender was a decisive force in shaping slave society. Slave men’s experiences differed from those of slave women, who were exploited both in reproductive as well as productive capacities. The women did not figure prominently in revolts, because they engaged in less confrontational resistance, emphasizing creative struggle to survive dehumanization and abuse. The contributors are Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, Cheryl Ann Cody, David Barry Gaspar, David P. Geggus, Virginia Meacham Gould, Mary Karasch, Wilma King, Bernard Moitt, Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, Robert A. Olwell, Claire Robertson, Robert W. Slenes, Susan M. Socolow, Richard H. Steckel, and Brenda E. Stevenson. “A much-needed volume on a neglected topic of great interest to scholars of women, slavery, and African American history. Its broad comparative framework makes it all the more important, for it offers the basis for evaluating similarities and contrasts in the role of gender in different slave societies. . . . [This] will be required reading for students all of the American South, women’s history, and African American studies.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

This Is Our Home

This Is Our Home PDF Author: Whitney Nell Stewart
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white. Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. By exploring the material remnants of the past, Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.

Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46

Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 PDF Author: Nancy Marie Robertson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252031938
Category : Christian women
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
As the major national biracial women's organization, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) provided a unique venue for women to respond to American race relations during the first half of the twentieth century. In Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46, Nancy Marie Robertson shows how women of both races employed different understandings of "Christian sisterhood" in their responses. Although the YWCA was segregated at the local level, African American women were able to effectively challenge white women over YWCA racial policies and practices. Robertson argues that from 1906 through 1946, many white women in the association went from seeing segregation as compatible with Christianity and democracy to regarding it as a contradiction of those values. These struggles laid the groundwork for the subsequent civil rights movement. Her analysis relies not only on a large body of records documenting YWCA women at the national and local levels, but also on autobiographical accounts and personal papers from women associated with the YWCA, including Dorothy Height, Lugenia Burns Hope, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Lillian Smith. A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White

Old Age and American Slavery

Old Age and American Slavery PDF Author: David Stefan Doddington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009463659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This book explores how age shaped slavery as an institution and how the aging process affected the enslaved and enslaver alike. It challenges static models of enslaved resistance and enslaver dominance by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the American South. Key reading for students and scholars of slavery in the US.

Working Cures

Working Cures PDF Author: Sharla M. Fett
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807853788
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

The Specter of the Indian

The Specter of the Indian PDF Author: Kathryn Troy
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438466099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Explores the significance of Indian control spirits as a dominating force in nineteenth-century American Spiritualism. The Specter of the Indian unveils the centrality of Native American spirit guides during the emergent years of American Spiritualism. By pulling together cultural and political history; the studies of religion, race, and gender; and the ghostly, Kathryn Troy offers a new layer of understanding to the prevalence of mystically styled Indians in American visual and popular culture. The connections between Spiritualist print and contemporary Indian policy provide fresh insight into the racial dimensions of social reform among nineteenth-century Spiritualists. Troy draws fascinating parallels between the contested belief of Indians as fading from the world, claims of returned apparitions, and the social impetus to provide American Indians with a means of existence in white America. Rather than vanishing from national sight and memory, Indians and their ghosts are shown to be ever present. This book transports the readers into dimly lit parlor rooms and darkened cabinets and lavishes them with detailed séance accounts in the words of those who witnessed them. Scrutinizing the otherworldly whisperings heard therein highlights the voices of mediums and those they sought to channel, allowing the author to dig deep into Spiritualist belief and practice. The influential presence of Indian ghosts is made clear and undeniable.