ENGL 8800 / FOLK 8200 / WGSS 8920 / AAS 6015: The Sacred and Secular in Black Feminist Folklore: Syllabus Materials

Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.

Ella Townsend, a young African American anthropologist whose roots are Caribbean, researches Louisiana folk life and discovers not only the world of voodoo and carnival but also the mystical connection of the living and the dead.

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe.

Perceptive and original, Ain't I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's place in American cultural and intellectual life.

In this "impressive debut" from award-winning speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson, a young woman must solve the tragic mystery surrounding her family and bargain with the gods to save her city and herself.

Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America's folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston.

In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.

A love story set in a black community off the Atlantic coast of Georgia.

Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females' subjectivities in Black women's culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.

The Things That Fly in the Night explores images of vampirism in Caribbean and African diasporic folk traditions and in contemporary fiction.

Recently Anna Julia Cooper has emerged as the most important classic writer in the tradition of African American feminist thought. Lemert and Bhan introduce Cooper as an activist, settlement founder, school teacher, college president, linguist, and scholar--a life that paralleled the prodigious accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois in so many ways.

A brilliant analysis of the blues which provides the historical, social and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday as the articulation of a black, working- class, feminist consciousness at odds with mainstream American culture.

Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women's relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly "listen to Black women," Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology.