Kirjahaku

This book features African American women playwrights from 1875 to 2000, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth century, a period rarely treated in regard to women's drama. Highlighting the lesser-known Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Eulalie Spence, and May Miller, and the well-known Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange, Peculiar Passages argues that these playwrights' efforts define a tradition characterized by quick-change mobility, sensitivity to vernacular forms, and dedication to intertextual dialogue. Situating the plays within a broader context, the book also connects them to minstrelsy, the Passion Play, and the Black Arts Movement."

This book features African American women playwrights from 1875 to 2000, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth century, a period rarely treated in regard to women's drama. Highlighting the lesser-known Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Eulalie Spence, and May Miller, and the well-known Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange, "Peculiar Passages" argues that these playwrights' efforts define a tradition characterized by quick-change mobility, sensitivity to vernacular forms, and dedication to intertextual dialogue. Situating the plays within a broader context, the book also connects them to minstrelsy, the Passion Play, and the Black Arts Movement."

Using literary criticism, theory, and sociohistoric data, this book brings into conversation black migrations with mystery novels by African American women, novels which explore fully the psychic, economic, and spiritual impact of mass migratory movements. Diaspora travel has been forced and selected and has extended from the Slave Trade through the contemporary moment, causing the black subject to wrestle with motion, the self in motion, the community in motion, the spirit in motion, culture in motion, and especially the past in motion. Reviewing these major migratory patterns of Africans to and within the United States from slavery to the present and defining the primary tropes and traditions in African American female mystery writing, each subsequent chapter looks intensely at specific figurative locations that could become a repository for reconstituted dense space in the new world. Detectives as penned by African American women writers sound out and deliberate over the viability of integrated institutions, the family, Bohemianism, religion, cities, class consciousness, and finally culture. Courses on African American literature, African American history and culture, detective fiction, urban studies, and women’s studies would find the book instructive.

Now in paperback Leah Lange Chase was raised in a small, country town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. With the values instilled in her by devoted parents-hard work, faith, and family-she soon grew into a woman to be reckoned with. In her roles as chef of the most popular Creole restaurant in New Orleans, nationally respected patron of the arts, and civic leader, she has influenced the world around her in important ways. Reading her story makes one think, If she can do it, maybe I can too.