Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (43) (Black Studies and Critical Thinking) - Softcover

Boylorn, Robin M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1433117754 ISBN 13: 9781433117756

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2012

Synopsis

This book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South. This book captures the artistry, strength, hope, sound, language, and creativity shared by first-hand accounts of black women in a familial village community in North Carolina. Sweetwater is about the black female experience as it relates to friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, raising children, and everyday survival. Written from field notes and memory, the author combines narrative and autoethnography to weave her own experiences as a rural black girl into the story, revealing the complexities of black women's lived experiences and exposing the communicative and interpersonal choices black women make through storytelling. Narrative inquiry and black feminism are offered as creative educational tools for discussing how and why black women's singular interior lives are culturally and globally significant.

About this title

Review:

«Robin M. Boylorn takes you intimately and viscerally into her life growing up and into the lives of the southern black rural women in her hometown. You hear women whispering and talking women-talk, see them worshiping and getting the spirit, smell the ham hocks cooking, sense the passion and pain of their daily romantic and family lives, feel their hearts beating and bleeding, share their resentment and love for themen who don't always do them right, and finally understand deeply the resilience it takes to get by no matter what challenges are thrown at you. Dr. Boylorn joins the creative genius of a Toni Morrison to the scholarship on black women's lives, exemplifying the ethnographic eye/I and ethical consciousness of the best of qualitative research. This is a stunning autoethnographic and narrative tour de force that will captivate students and scholars alike.» (Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Sociology and Communication Studies, Universityof South Florida, and Author of 'Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work')

About the Author:

Robin M. Boylorn is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at The University of Alabama, where she teaches and writes about the intersections of race, gender/sex, class, and sexuality. Her primary research interests focus on the lived and storied experiences of black women, social identity, diversity, and critical auto/ethnography. In addition to academic publications she also writes feminist and cultural critiques as a member of the Crunk Feminist Collective.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1433117754
• ISBN 13: 9781433117756
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 156