Cultural Sites of Critical Insight

Angela L. Cotten is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. Christa Davis Acampora is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is coeditor (with Ralph R. Acampora) of A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal.

"…Cotten and Acampora's text serves as a valuable source to the growing research on African American and Native American culture, with its narrowed focus on literature and writing produced by women." — Feminist Formations"…these essays tackle both the failure to address all aspects of African Native identities and the absence of sustained studies of African Native literature." — The Year's Work in English Studies"The essays offer some fresh perspectives on well-known works and will prove useful to students and scholars in philosophy, women's studies, and the humanities … the collection does a good job in presenting new ways of thinking about texts that challenge traditional disciplinary divisions." — American Indian Quarterly

• I. Introduction 1. On the "Res" and in the "Hood": Making Cultures, Leaving LegaciesAngela L. CottenII. Transformative Aesthetics 2. Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of TransformationAnaLouise Keating3. Making the Awakening Hers: Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian ReligiosityElizabeth J. West4. "Any Woman’s Blues": Sherley Anne Williams and the Blues AestheticMichael A. AntonucciIII. Critical Revisions 5. Through the Mirror: Re-Surfacing and Self-Articulation in Linda Hogan’s Solar StormsEllen L. Arnold6. The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian: Asserting a Cherokee Womanist SensibilityBarbara S. Tracy7. Womanist Interventions in Historical MaterialismAngela L. CottenIV. Re(In)Fusing Feminism 8. "Both the Law and Its Transgression": Toni Morrison’s Paradise and "Post"–Black FeminismNoelle Morrissette9. Luci Tapahonso’s "Leda and the Cowboy": A Gynocratic, Navajo Response to Yeats’s "Leda and the Swan"Maggie Romigh10. Mother Times Two: A Double Take on a Gynocentric Justice SongMargot ReynoldsReferencesContributorsIndex