As scholars increasingly reconsider the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Courtney Thorsson's Women's Work stands at the cutting edge of scholarship that assesses the legacy of that movement for black women writers. Thorsson theorizes a strand of contemporary African American women's novels that “reclaim and revise cultural nationalism” (1) as a literary discourse and everyday practice. Through meticulous, original readings of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1980), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), Thorsson argues that these “novels of the cultural nationalist revision” (4, 12) theorize a cultural nationalism that depends upon “shared longing and radical imagining” (12) as performed through practices of organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping, and inscribing. “Women's work” names the fictional activities through which characters imagine a “sovereign homeland in spaces as local as the...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
May 01 2016
Re-enchanted with the Work Available to Purchase
Thorsson, Courtney,
Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels
(Charlottesville
: U of Virginia P
, 2013
), pp. 227, paper, $27.50.
Emily J. Lordi
Emily J. Lordi
emily j. lordi is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and a forthcoming book on the album Donny Hathaway Live. She is also writing a musical-literary history of the concept of “soul.”
Search for other works by this author on:
Novel (2016) 49 (1): 162–165.
Citation
Emily J. Lordi; Re-enchanted with the Work. Novel 1 May 2016; 49 (1): 162–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-3458373
Download citation file:
Advertisement
41
Views