<p>My dissertation is a Black feminist inquiry into how Black women writers employ soul food imagery to equally assert their characters’ Blackness and sexual agency in post-Black Arts texts. These include Gayl Jones’ <em>Eva’s Man </em>(1976), Ntozake Shange’s <em>Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo</em> (1982), Gloria Naylor’s <em>Bailey’s Café</em> (1992), and TT Bridgeman’s <em>Pound Cake for Sweet Pea </em>(2004). These novelists tell complex stories of Black women’s grappling with respectability, trauma, and erotic and sexual agency. In each novel, these Black women share a common reliance upon soul food that is often underexamined in critical scholarship. I argue that soul food is essential to how Black women cope with the duality of pleasure and pain by helping them assert liberated senses-of-self amidst sexism and its attendant emotional and physical violence. I also conceptualize this coping as a vibrational reprieve. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/20401326 |
| Date | 29 July 2022 |
| Creators | Megan M Williams (13173846) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/VIBRATIONAL_REPRIEVES_BLACK_WOMEN_S_SOUL_FOOD_NARRATIVES_AS_AESTHETIC_SITES_OF_EROTIC_AND_SEXUAL_AGENCY/20401326 |
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