In search of a beautiful freedom : new and selected essays /

In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin's rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19 and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of so...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Griffin, Farah Jasmine (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2023].
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Learning how to listen
  • Ladies sing Miles
  • When Malindy sings: a meditation on Black women's vocality
  • Returning to Lady Day: a reflection on two decades "in search of Billie Holiday"
  • Songs of experience: Odetta
  • Quiet, stillness, and longing to be free: the ethereal soul of Syreeta Wright, Minnie Riperton, and Deniece Williams
  • Following Geri's lead
  • Look where your hands are now
  • Wrestling till dawn: on becoming an intellectual in the age of Toni Morrison
  • Albert Raboteau: an appreciation (drawn from remarks on the occasion of his retirement from Princeton University, April 26, 2013)
  • Minnie's sacrifice: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's narrative of citizenship
  • Zora Neale Hurston's radical individualism
  • Hunting communists and negroes in Ann Petry's The Narrows
  • "It takes two people to confirm the truth": the jazz fiction of Sherley Ann Williams and Toni Cade Bambara
  • Learning how to listen: Ntozake Shange's work as aesthetic primer
  • Remaking the everyday: the interior worlds of Kathleen Collins's fiction and film
  • A place of freedom: Gayl Jones's Brazilian epic
  • Treating the serpent's sting
  • Textual healing: claiming Black women's bodies, the erotic, and resistance in contemporary novels of slavery
  • "Ironies of the saint": Malcolm X, Black women, and the price of protection
  • Conflict and chorus: reconsidering Toni Cade's The Black Women: An Anthology
  • That the mothers may soar and the daughters may know their names: a retrospective of Black feminist literary criticism
  • At last...?: Michelle Obama, BeyoncĂ©, race, and history
  • One crisis and possibility
  • On the fourth anniversary of September 11
  • Human rights and the Katrina evacuees
  • DNC day 2: will America accept First Lady Michelle?
  • Loving Billie Holiday doesn't mean Black girls aren't suffering: a response to Joshua DuBois and My Brother's Keeper
  • Teaching African American literature during COVID-19
  • Banning Toni Morrison's books doesn't protect kids. It just sanitizes racism
  • Ancient histories and new worlds: Allison Janae Hamilton.