Description
Book SynopsisThis book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South. This book captures the artistry, strength, hope, sound, language, and creativity shared by first-hand accounts of black women in a familial village community in North Carolina.
Sweetwater is about the black female experience as it relates to friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, raising children, and everyday survival. Written from field notes and memory, the author combines narrative and autoethnography to weave her own experiences as a rural black girl into the story, revealing the complexities of black women's lived experiences and exposing the communicative and interpersonal choices black women make through storytelling. Narrative inquiry and black feminism are offered as creative educational tools for dis
Trade Review«Robin M. Boylorn takes you intimately and viscerally into her life growing up and into the lives of the southern black rural women in her hometown. You hear women whispering and talking women-talk, see them worshiping and getting the spirit, smell the ham hocks cooking, sense the passion and pain of their daily romantic and family lives, feel their hearts beating and bleeding, share their resentment and love for themen who don’t always do them right, and finally understand deeply the resilience it takes to get by no matter what challenges are thrown at you. Dr. Boylorn joins the creative genius of a Toni Morrison to the scholarship on black women’s lives, exemplifying the ethnographic eye/I and ethical consciousness of the best of qualitative research. This is a stunning autoethnographic and narrative tour de force that will captivate students and scholars alike.» (Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Sociology and Communication Studies, Universityof South Florida, and Author of ‘Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work’)
«Robin M. Boylorn takes you intimately and viscerally into her life growing up and into the lives of the southern black rural women in her hometown. You hear women whispering and talking women-talk, see them worshiping and getting the spirit, smell the ham hocks cooking, sense the passion and pain of their daily romantic and family lives, feel their hearts beating and bleeding, share their resentment and love for themen who don’t always do them right, and finally understand deeply the resilience it takes to get by no matter what challenges are thrown at you. Dr. Boylorn joins the creative genius of a Toni Morrison to the scholarship on black women’s lives, exemplifying the ethnographic eye/I and ethical consciousness of the best of qualitative research. This is a stunning autoethnographic and narrative tour de force that will captivate students and scholars alike.» (Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Sociology and Communication Studies, Universityof South Florida, and Author of ‘Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work’)
