Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, RaceEarly American Women Critics demonstrates that performances of various kinds - religious, political and cultural - enabled women to enter the human rights debates that roiled the American colonies and young republic. Black and white women staked their claims on American citizenship through disparate performances of spirit possession, patriotism, poetic and theatrical production. They protected themselves within various shields which allowed them to speak openly while keeping the individual basis of their identities invisible. Cima shows that between the First and Second Great Religious Awakenings (1730s–1830s), women from West Africa, Europe, and various corners of the American colonies self-consciously adopted performance strategies that enabled them to critique American culture and establish their own diverse and contradictory claims on the body politic. This book restores the primacy of religious performances - Christian, Yoruban, Bantu and Muslim - to the study of early American cultural and political histories, revealing that religion and race are inseparable. |
Contents
Section 15 | 112 |
Section 16 | 123 |
Section 17 | 124 |
Section 18 | 134 |
Section 19 | 139 |
Section 20 | 147 |
Section 21 | 149 |
Section 22 | 156 |
Section 9 | 66 |
Section 10 | 67 |
Section 11 | 83 |
Section 12 | 84 |
Section 13 | 86 |
Section 14 | 96 |
Section 23 | 165 |
Section 24 | 187 |
Section 25 | 205 |
Section 26 | 212 |
Section 27 | 216 |
Section 28 | 220 |
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Common terms and phrases
Abigail Adams African American women African and African American culture American women critics Anglican anonymous anti-slavery audience authorship Awakening ballad black women Boston British Cambridge camp meetings Catharine Macaulay Charles Town Christian activist Christopher Bigsby church claim colonial colonists Constantia conversion critique cultured American Deerfield England English enslaved European American European American women evangelical exhorters female free blacks freedom Gazette gender genius Gleaner History host body identity invisible John Adams JSMP Judith Murray Judith Sargent Murray Lee and Elaw letters linked literary Lucy Terry male Massachusetts Magazine Mercy Otis Warren Mercy Warren MOW Papers Murray's Muslim nation natural rights Negro Paine patriot performing critics Philadelphia Phillis Wheatley play playwright poems political preachers preaching pseudonyms published Raboteau race racial rational Christian religion religious Revolutionary Rowson sexual slavery South Carolina spirit possession spiritual stage Susanna Susanna Rowson Terry Terry's Timothy Universalist University Press visible Wheatley's Whitefield woman York