Spiritual Interrogations By Bassard

Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writings

By Katherine Clay Bassard

Review

The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people.

Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet Phyllis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with lee, had connections with African Methodism.

Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spiritual matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. they were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life.

Katherine Bassard's Spiritual Interrogations is an excellent example of the coming of age of African American literary studies and the assurance that the torch is passing into the capable hands of a new generation. Thi is the kind of book that will indeed advance the current discourse on the efficacy of nineteenth-century black women's writings. It is a much needed text. --Nellie McKay, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In terms of its theoretical boldness, scholarly meticulousness, and critical acuity, this book is refreshingly original. . . .Bassard's discussions of specific texts are, in general, simply unparalleled in their rigor and attention to detail. . . . This book is certain to make a major contribution to a variety of fields. --Valerie Smith, University of California, Los Angeles