Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience, Revised Edition / Edition 1

by Robin Boylorn, Rochelle Brock, Cynthia B. Dillard

Overview

Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural south. At times heartbreaking, at times humorous, Sweetwater captures the artistry, strength, language and creativity shared by first-hand accounts of black women in small-town North Carolina during the twentieth century. The book uncovers the versatility and universality of black women’s experiences and their exceptional capacity to love in the face of adversity, and hope in the midst of calamity. Sweetwater is about the black female experience as it relates to friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, and everyday survival. The merging themes show the resilience and resistance that black women exhibit while negotiating the intersecting oppressions of racism, classism, and sexism.

Written from field notes and memory, the author reveals the complexities of black women’s lived experiences by 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 and interior lives are culturally and globally significant.

This revised edition preserves the original narratives but features new content including re-views, re-visions and re-considerations for re-writing autoethnography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433134937
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	05/29/2017
Series:	Black Studies and Critical Thinking , #100
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robin M. Boylorn is Associate Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at the University of Alabama. She is the co-editor of Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life and co-writer of The Crunk Feminist Collection. Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience received the 2013 It’s A Way of Life Narrative Ethnography Award, the 2013 Best Book Award by the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association, and the 2014 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Her forthcoming book, Blackgirl Blue(s), introduces blackgirl (one word) autoethnography as a methodological intervention for women of color.

Editorial Reviews

The stories in Sweetwater are like oxygen after held breath—exhilarating, satisfying, and sustaining. Twiggy, Bread, and Bird love and scold, teach and hold each other, the women in their community, and the reader through their stories, lives, and worlds. Robin M. Boylorn is a writer who breathes air and life into her inheritance and shares the stories of her mothers with honesty, care, hope, and strength.” —Stacy Holman Jones, Professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University, and Co-editor of <The Handbook of Autoethnography

“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 worshipping 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 the men 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 of 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 Communication Studies and Sociology, University of South Florida, and Author of <Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work

“Zora Neale Hurston is kicking dirt up out her grave! With Robin M. Boylorn’s brave work, dust tracks become lineage and lines of text become clotheslines again. All that we are is hung out here to dry, wave surrender, or see morning. In content and form Dr. Boylorn’s Sweetwater actualizes the black feminist imperative to lift up our stories, in this case the stories of rural black women, as catalysts towards a world better understood, more deeply held, and more transformatively loved.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, Co-Creator of the Queer Black Mobile Homecoming Project, and Author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity

From the Publisher