Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women's Fiction

by Maha Marouan

Overview

Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women’s spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé.
 
Author Maha Marouan argues that while these authors’ works burst with powerful female figures—witches, goddesses, healers, priestesses, angry spirits—they also remain honest in reminding readers of the silences surrounding African diaspora women’s realities and experiences of violence, often as a result of gendered religious discourses. To make sense of Africana women’s experiences of the diaspora, this book operates from a transnational perspective that moves across national and linguistic boundaries as it connects the Anglophone, the Francophone, and the Creole worlds of the African Americas. In doing so, Marouan identifies crucial shared thematic concerns regarding the authors’ engagement with religious frameworks—some Judeo-Christian, some not—heretofore unexamined in such a careful, comparative fashion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814256633
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	10/09/2020
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Maha Marouan is associate professor in the department of Gender and Race Studies and the director of the African American Studies program at the University of Alabama.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Theoretical and Thematic Framework 1

Chapter 2 In the Spirit of Erzulie: Vodou and the Reimagining of Haitian Womanhood in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory 37

Chapter 3 "Thunder, Perfect Mind": Candomblé, Gnosticism, and the Utopian Impulse in Toni Morrison's Paradise 71

Chapter 4 Conjuring History: The Meaning of Witchcraft in Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 103

Chapter 5 Conclusion: The Return of Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits 153

Bibliography 159

Index 167

Editorial Reviews

Maha Marouan beautifully illumines the strategies of Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, and Maryse Condé in reconstructing religions of the African diaspora as models of female liberation, inscribing black female spirituality into history and effectively addressing social injustice. She gets hold of the thrust of these three novelists and demonstrates how they compose fresh models of female spirituality, invoke groundbreaking cultural associations and forms of religious creolization, and generate new spiritual assurance for Africana women. Thus, Marouan presents us with a powerful work appealing to scholars and students in religion, cultural studies, literature, and diaspora studies.” —Jacob K. Olupona, professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and African Religious Traditions at Harvard Divinity School

“This is clearly a fine, talented young scholar. She is innovative in her approach to literature, ranging across disciplines to open a discussion of diaspora identity that is badly needed. This work, with its attention to multiple methods, theories, and media, will open an important discussion in African and African Diaspora Studies.” —Carolyn Jones Medine, associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia

From the Publisher