Languages, Literatures and Writing

By focusing on reading incidences of ethnic cultural memory within texts, including rituals particular to ethnic traditions and practices, we can construct a framework from which to identify parallels and intersections between texts by African-American and Chicana women. To that end, reading intersections necessitates participation in what Tey Diana Rebolledo calls a “Salpicón Analysis,” meaning to utilize “a bit of this and a bit of that” (Rebolledo 5). While I focus on Holloway’s theory, I also argue for the recognition of intersections between female presence/subjectivity, language, ritual, spirituality, and feminist medical ethics that are present in both African-American and Chicana women’s fiction as salpicón analysis strategies. Salpicón analysis considers the particularized implications of racialized representations, ethnic cultural memory and the gendered existence of these women. This essay offers salpicón analysis as a theoretical framework that defines, identifies and focuses on intersections and parallel strategies that speak to issues of healing and wholeness that occur through memory.

While even such a handful of texts suggest the burgeoning
interest in ritual theories, the application of ritual principles for
teaching literature or literature-based
composition is rare. Certainly the pursuit
of intercultural ways of knowing can lead to further exploration of how
students connect to and engage with texts using methods that foster access to
their own content and contexts. But there is a relative simplicity to ritual that
can be applied in virtually any classroom, even as there is enough complexity
to ritual that suggests its use as a pedagogical principle for assisting students
in their critical thinking, critical reading, and creative writing.

This chapter is a reflection and contemplation on the intersections
of service—to my family, to my people, to my profession—
as a common denominator of my identities within a predominately
white university and how Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt
Eaters speaks to/about that intersection. I argue that the common
denominator of being black, female, mother, and professor in a predominately
white academic space is the perception and balance of
service, a particular conundrum in an environment where service
typically ranks last in the conversation about hiring, tenure and
promotion; however, much like healing fiction by black women
authors, using ritual to understand the experience is both reflective
and prophetic.

This essay considers the implications of teaching about Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement that joins a long tradition of Black American protest. We reflect on how BLM helps us illustrate intersectionality in the classroom. To make our argument, we take as a case study the controversy surrounding the Cincinnati Women's March in January 2018: BLM Cincinnati declined to participate in the march after Women's March organizers refused to listen to BLM's critiques of the theme "Hear Our Vote." We analyze the events, mainstream discourse, and activist statements around the controversy and reflect on how to use the conflict pedagogically.

In this article, we trace arguments for the sacredness of Black life from Sojourner Truth to the Combahee River Collective to the founders of Black Lives Matter, arguing that Black women have consistently drawn on sacred and ritual structures to argue not just that Black life matters but also that Black life has inherent value. As such, we conclude with reflections on Black feminist ethics as an extension of the doctrine of imago dei.

In responding to a question about the most important lessons learned by Lauren Oya Olamina in the Parable series, Octavia E. Butler ends her response thus: “She learns to be an activist” (340). I posit that her characterization reflects an archetype that invokes intersectional bodies navigating particular mythologies to survive. I explore the relevance of the "methodology of emancipation" Sandoval theorizes in her book, Methodology of the Oppressed as a collective set of technologies that demonstrate the resistant and resourceful role of such characters through what Sandoval calls a “‘coalitional consciousness’ in cultural studies across racialized, sexualized, genderized theoretical domains...” (Sandoval 79). Sandoval theorizes the work of third world feminisms and cultural studies to operationalize critical theory, cultural, gender, and ethnic studies into five technologies that provides a framework for understanding activism as an archetypal trope within black womanist SFF. Butler and other Black women SFF writers such as NK Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson create intersectional characters who complicate existing archetypes that suggest a separation between identity, motivation, and action. Using Sandoval’s paradigm, Lauren is not only a signifier of black liberation, but the resonance of Sandoval’s emancipatory technologies. Lauren does what Sandoval refers to as “dissident and coalitional cosmopolitics,” (Sandoval 3). I outline and posit Sandoval's methodology as a compass for understanding and discussing the role of resistance and activism in SF texts by black women.