Jacqueline Jones Royster – författare

Explores personal and professional issues in the study of race, gender, and culture.Winner of the 2006 Nancy Dasher Award for Best Book on Professional and Pedagogical Issues In recent decades, the concepts of race, gender, and culture have come to function as "calling cards," the terms by which we announce ourselves as professionals and negotiate acceptance and/or rejection in the academic marketplace. In this volume, contributors from composition, literature, rhetoric, literacy, and cultural studies share their experiences and insights as researchers, scholars, and teachers who centralize these concepts in their work. Reflecting deliberately on their own research and classroom practices, the contributors share theoretical frameworks, processes, and methodologies; consider the quality of the knowledge and the understanding that their theoretical approaches generate; and address various challenges related to what it actually means to perform this type of work both professionally and personally, especially in light of the ways in which we are all raced, gendered, and acculturated.

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740–1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825–1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740–1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825–1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740-1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825-1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

In Finding Sarah and Mary, Jacqueline Jones Royster combines memoir, family lore, DNA data, local history, and national history to create an ancestral history narrative. Surveying a forty-year journey of discovery, Jones Royster weaves and reweaves data and details corralled from multiple sources and anchors the narrative with two women: Sarah Ashe (c. 1740-1820), a maternal ancestor, and Mary Craddock Wilson (1825-1907), a paternal ancestor. With these two women as anchor points, the volume offers a view of the lives and legacies of ordinary folk in the making and shaping of an American story and demonstrates the necessity of broadening, deepening, and often upending our vision to see how our ancestors lived. Finding Sarah and Mary offers a clearer and more vibrant understanding of what it has meant for people of African descent to live and work in a nation that often ignores them or leaves them out of their own story.

Traces of a Stream offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas. In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well. Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.