Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching

A timely invocation of early Black Christian women writers and their legacy of activism.

Weaving together the legacies of early Black Christian women, author April C. E. Langley explores the foundational ways in which faith, poetics, and spirituality have shaped Black activism in the United States. In Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching, Langley employs Afrofuturist and Sankofic lenses to provide a dynamic close reading of the speeches, letters, poems, and sermons of three foremothers of modern Black women’s social justice movements—Phillis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, and Jarena Lee—and highlights the resistance strategies emerging from their use of religion as a means for imagination and potential liberation. This book shows how Black women’s spiritual writing has also inspired and informed intersectional social justice movements of today’s era—#SayHerName, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter—as well as impacting the profound works of scholars, politicians, community leaders, and artists such as Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Tarana Burke, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé. This timely examination of early Black Christian women and their writing reminds us of the importance of retrieving what is lost to understand where we are and where we are going.

Author Biography

April C. E. Langley is associate professor and chair of African American studies at the University of South Carolina and associate professor emerita of English and Black studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is author of The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature.