Bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this book offers fresh perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. The essays draw on interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods in the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams, making them more accessible for critical consideration in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. The contributors formulate unique frameworks for interpreting the multiple levels of complex, cultural play between Native American and African American women writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for reassessing writers of both traditions.

I. Introduction

1. On the “Res” and in the “Hood”: Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies
     Angela L. Cotten

II. Transformative Aesthetics

2. Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’sGrandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation
      AnaLouise Keating

3. Making the Awakening Hers: Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity
     Elizabeth J. West

4. “Any Woman’s Blues”: Sherley Anne Williams and the Blues Aesthetic
     Michael A. Antonucci

III. Critical Revisions

5. Through the Mirror: Re-Surfacing and Self-Articulation in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
     Ellen L. Arnold

6. The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian: Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility
     Barbara S. Tracy

7. Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism
     Angela L. Cotten

IV. Re(In)Fusing Feminism

8. “Both the Law and Its Transgression”: Toni Morrison’sParadise and “Post”–Black Feminism
     Noelle Morrissette

9. Luci Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy”: A Gynocratic, Navajo Response to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”
     Maggie Romigh

10. Mother Times Two: A Double Take on a Gynocentric Justice Song
     Margot Reynolds

References
Contributors
Index