Description
Book SynopsisIn Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black women's writing but that it also shapes the formal elements characteristic of the Black women's literary tradition. Refusing to Be Made Whole analyzes texts published after the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the late 1970s onward when Black women's writing flour
