Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching: Early Black Christian Women's Lives Matter (African American Life) - Softcover

April C. E. Langley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814349897 ISBN 13: 9780814349892

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 2025

Synopsis

A timely invocation of early Black Christian women writers and their legacy of activism.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814349897
• ISBN 13: 9780814349892
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288