Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora

Mae G. Henderson is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817-1871 (1980).

• CONTENTS ; Introduction ; 1. Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Revisions and Redefinitions ; 2. (W)Riting The Work and Working the Rites ; 3. Speaking in Tongues: Dialectics, Dialogics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition ; 4. Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text ; 5. The Stories of (O)Dessa: Stories of Complicity and Resistance ; 6. "Seen But Not Heard": A Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing ; 7. Gayl Jones's White Rat: Speaking Silence/Silencing Speech ; 8. State of the Art: Black Feminist Theory ; 9. What It Means to Teach the Other When the Other Is the Self ; 10. Authors and Authorities ; 11. Nella Larsen's Passing: Passing, Performance, and (Post)modernism ; 12. Josephine Baker and La Revue Negre: From Ethnography to Performance ; 13. Dancing Diaspora: Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Readings of Josephine Baker as Dancer and Performance Artist ; 14. About Face, or, What Is This "Back" in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie ; IN RETROSPECT ; 15. Sherley Anne Williams: "Someone Sweet Angel Chile" ; 16. Bebe Moore Campbell: "Literature as Equipment for Living" ; Bibliography ; Index

Mae Henderson's always luminous, often foundational work is a gift to all who study women's writing and African American literature. Fusing beautiful theorizing with insightful close readings, Henderson illuminates Josephine Baker's performances and hip-hop videos as brilliantly as she does the fictions of Hurston, Morrison, and Walker.