African Spiritual Traditions In The Novels Of Toni Morrison

Author : K. Zauditu-Selassie
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by K. Zauditu-Selassie and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author. No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison's work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie's many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison's work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing."--Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. K. Zauditu-Selassie delves deeply into African spiritual traditions, clearly explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a comprehensive, tour-de-force critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive. Zauditu-Selassie explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. Zauditu-Selassie is uniquely positioned to write this book, as she is not only a literary critic but also a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and nonfiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Author : Nadra Nittle
Publisher : Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN 13 : 150647151X
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision written by Nadra Nittle and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks an oft-ignored but essential element of her work--her religion--and in so doing gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. Nadra Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.

Author : Toni Morrison
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0375415351
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sula written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002-04-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Author : Anne Margaret Castro
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813943469
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sacred Act of Reading written by Anne Margaret Castro and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.

Author : Maha Marouan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780814256633
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits written by Maha Marouan and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Toni Morrison
Publisher : Everyman's Library
ISBN 13 : 0307264882
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Author : Therese E. Higgins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317794184
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Religiosity, Cosmology and Folklore written by Therese E. Higgins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples, relates these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African-American product, and elucidates how this connection helps to understand and to clarify many of Morrison's allusions to the culture out of which she writes. It presents a new way of reading Morrison's work that has been previously overlooked, and moves beyond just African-American culture, delving into Africa and its people.

Author : K. Zauditu-Selassie
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Line written by K. Zauditu-Selassie and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 1929. The place is Los Angeles, a segregated city as race-restrictive as the Deep South. There are three things that are very clear to Viola. First, her sister Iola is in grave spiritual trouble and needs assistance. Second, she, herself, needs to make some major life changes despite the myriad obstacles standing in her way. Third, she must bring her two nieces to New Orleans to begin their initiations, or they will suffer the same fate as Iola. The Second Line is an intergenerational story of spiritual adventure that vibrantly weaves through the shadows of a family's fight for survival, power, and legacy. About the Author K. Zauditu Selassie received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Baltimore and the Doctor of Arts degree from Clark Atlanta University and is a retired Professor of English. She is the author of an award-winning book of literary criticism, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison. She has traveled the world from Compton to Cairo, from Bamako to Baltimore, and Addis to Atlanta, collecting stories along the way. A word whisperer, her literary imagination is peopled by: sex workers, women adept in making poison, root women, astral travelers, shape-shifters, maroons, and lonely widows in search of sexual satisfaction. She is a priest of Obàtálá in the Lukumi Yoruba tradition and a descendant of a matrilineal group of Hoodoo believers from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Author : A. Yemisi Jimoh
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 9781572331723
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction written by A. Yemisi Jimoh and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : La Vinia Delois Jennings
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521173391
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa written by La Vinia Delois Jennings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison's fiction has been read as a contribution to and critique of Western civilization and Christianity. La Vinia Jennings reveals the fundamental role African traditional religious symbols play in her work. Based on extensive research into West African religions and philosophy, Jennings uncovers and interprets the African themes, images and cultural resonances in Morrison's fiction. She shows how symbols brought to the Americas by West African slaves are used by Morrison in her landscapes, interior spaces, and the bodies of her characters. Jennings's analysis of these symbols shows how a West African collective worldview informs both Morrison's work, and contemporary African-American life and culture. This important contribution to Morrison studies will be of great interest to scholars of African-American literature.