Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race

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Cambridge University Press, May 25, 2006 - Drama
Early 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.
 

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Contents

Section 1
21
Section 2
24
Section 3
25
Section 4
40
Section 5
45
Section 6
53
Section 7
54
Section 8
61
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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About the author (2006)

Gay Gibson Cima is a Professor of English and the Director of the Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University.

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