Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women's Literature

Adopting an inclusive pan-American approach to black women's literature, Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts offers fresh readings of previously neglected works by black women writers from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In this radical reassessment, the contributors present the black woman writer in all her rich complexity by seeking affinities among writers across the Americas, thus moving away from a compartmentalized manner of studying black literature and toward a comprehensive examination of black American identities. Using a wide range of critical methods, the essays address marginalized yet significant works by writers such as Mary Prince, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna J. Cooper, Jessie Fauset, Ann Petry, and Virginia Bridis de Salas. The contributors -- including both established scholars and emerging ones -- engage issues of genre, gender, geopolitics, and diasporan aesthetics raised by the varied lives and works considered in this collection. The volume as a whole reveals the similarities among geographically diverse black women writers and documents a number of common artistic themes and concerns, including the writer's place within the community, the construction of black sexuality, and the representation of a self that is black and female. Through their historic recovery and critical reclamation of black texts, the essayists demonstrate how black feminist scholarship since the 1960s has both shaped and reconstructed the ongoing tradition of black woman's literature in the Americas. Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts acknowledges the central role black women have played in the production of American literary meaning and makes an important contribution by reassessing the ways in which African American literature can be understood and taught.