My Soul Is A Witness: Reimagining African American Women’s Spirituality and the Black Female Body in African American Literature

Abstract

This special issue seeks to explore the ways in which writers reclaim the black female body in African American literature using the theoretical, social, cultural, and religious frameworks of spirituality and religion. Of key importance to this collection is black women’s agency—acknowledged and affirmed in prose, poetry, essays, speeches, written plays, or short stories. Whether it is Indigo (Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo) creating a world with her dolls that shepherds her through her rite of passage to womanhood, or Baby Suggs declaring in her “fixing ceremonies” in the Clearing that “in this here place, we flesh,” (Beloved), authors have sought to discuss the tensions of the sacred and secular through concepts such as forgiveness, redemption, passion, alienation, motherhood, sex, marriage, among others.