Spirit Deep - (Studies in Religion and Culture) by Tisha M Brooks (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously?
- About the Author: Tisha Brooks is Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
- 288 Pages
- Literary Criticism, American
- Series Name: Studies in Religion and Culture
Description
About the Book
"This interdisciplinary study of Black women's travel bridges religious, literary, and Black studies to demonstrate the role of the sacred in their movements and practices of freedom. Spirit Deep explores the radical spiritual practices of Black women across a wide range of texts-biblical narrative, spiritual autobiography, travel narrative, and film. In addition to the narrative of Hagar, texts considered include those by Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Berry Smith, and Nancy Prince as well as the films of Julie Dash and Saidiya Hartman"--Book Synopsis
What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women's Travel, Tisha Brooks addresses this question by focusing on three nineteenth-century Black women writers who merged the spiritual and travel narrative genres: Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Smith, and Nancy Prince. Brooks hereby challenges the divides between religious and literary studies, and between coerced and "free" passages within travel writing studies to reveal meaningful new connections in Black women's writings. Bringing together both sacred and secular texts, Spirit Deep uncovers an enduring spiritual legacy of movement and power that Black women have claimed for themselves in opposition to the single story of the Black (female) body as captive, monstrous, and strange. Spirit Deep thus addresses the marginalization of Black women from larger conversations about travel writing, demonstrating the continuing impact of their spirituality and movements in our present world.
Review Quotes
Spirit Deep presents a timely intervention into Black women's figurative and literal travel and literature focusing on the intersection between Black women's mobility/subjectivity and their spirituality/epistemology.
--Jami Carlacio, Yale UniversityThe literal and literary 'crossings and connections' Brooks cites align perfectly with the fluid line between sacred and secular that characterizes this study and its contents. Spirit Deep further considers the contemporary ways in which the same enduring issues of power raised by nineteenth-century women on the move continue to haunt African Americans' movements in the present.
--Kimberly Rae Connor, University of San Francisco, author of Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative TraditionAbout the Author
Tisha Brooks is Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
