African Diaspora Women’s Knowledge: Ethics and Agency in Domestic and Religious Spheres

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world”. Valued for their work, and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and their central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere. Yet, concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. Maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel some of the tropes and caricatures, by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, their religious institutions and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.