African American Women Writers

A Black woman in 1970s Alabama is possessed by ancestor spirits and experiences the cruelties of slavery. Chain marks appear on her arms and legs, and sexual intercourse with her husband is like rape by slavers. She tells her story after emerging from an asylum.

Chronicles the lives of three sisters who experience much more than the bond of family. Eva, Mary Nell, and Grace share with each other and with generations of their female ancestors the ability to see into the future and to remember the pain of the past, even of events long before their birth.

Explores African American historical fiction written by women in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Nunes' approach to the texts aims at emphasizing the narrative and thematic achievements of individual novels set in the context of the main trends and developments of the contemporary African American historical novel.

Traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds--the intertwinement of the mental and the physical--in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson--where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic--destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

Explores the symbol of the wounded and scarred female body in selected postmodern, multiethnic American women's novels, namely Toni Morrison's Beloved, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Emma Pérez's Gulf Dreams, Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless. In each of these novels, disjointed, postmodern writing reflects the novel's focus on fragmented female bodies. The wounded and scarred body emerges from various, often intersecting, forms of oppression, including patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. This book emphasizes the different and nuanced forms of oppression each woman faces.