rough & unedited

Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

Connor reads twentieth century black women’s literature as “dramas of conversion into selfhood” (3) that might not be specifically religious, but are shaped by religious influence in a wide cultural context. Citing McDowell as a major critical influence.

Conversion as “moving beyond roles that are products of certain social expectations”—which take the narrative place of sin in religious conversion narratives—“to a more stable and conscious level of identity”—which, in my reading, serves as the substitute for religious awakening or spiritual enlightenment.

“challenged received theological notions about the role of women and laid foundations for future feminist speculation” (6)—Jacbos, Jackson, Truth, and the other women, I would assume, covered in the other texts.

As African American culture disperses (“diversifie[s]” 6), the conversation becomes less directly religious, but still invokes/is part of religious traditions—“their conversions become not literal but literary” as part of a multi-generational conversation that evokes the holistic pattern of belief that the conversions point to anyway. The last point is mine but the quote comes from p.7.

The concept of a “sacred story” closely parallels what I have called a “spiritual allegory”—a story that targets people’s lives toward the “’great powers’” and “may carry the authority of scripture for the people who understand their own stories in relation to them” (9). Because of this scriptural element, as well as the interaction with consciousness and self-perception, a sacred story is an anthropological reality—a way that people understand themselves and the world and their relation to larger forces. As Connor puts it, “every sacred story is a creation story that creates a world of consciousness and the self that is oriented to it” (9).

Religious consciousness is at the essence of African American responses to new cultural situations and forms; over time this religious consciousness became cultural, and created an aesthetic response, which black women writers have taken up as a challenge (25-26). It is the excess—the radicalism and reveisioning, and also the historicizing, back to Africa nature of it—the fact that it imagines an outside and a radical response to culture—that marks it as strange, other to theory, not quiet human, but also erntirely embedded/contiguous with its own tradition. It is a mysticism, but the mysticism has conventions; Doc Serge is not quite there, but he does a lot of good stuff anyway. It’s making me think of the Salt-Eaters specifically.

Donald Gelpi’s discussion of “will as a spiritual faculty” (34) that integrates spiritual awakening with ‘conscious, personal responsibility’ for growing and remaining open to “divine self-revelation” in “every authentic instance” (34-35).

Connor uses a number of religious and psychological theorists—including William James—to articulate the psychological and religious experiences of the women in these texts. But it seems oddly separate to me, like, here is what people have said theoretically about this, rather than promoting those past spiritual leaders as theologians, as Moody argues they are/were.

A useful definition of spirituality: deriving from “feminist” religious theologians, Connor quotes the distinction that Amanda Porterfield makes: “’spirituality refers to personal attitudes … that engage an individual’s deepst feelings and most fundamental beliefs’”; an experience of the transcendent and of moral markers that are not yoked to an organized religion or belief in deity/deities (38). It would be useful here to clarify whether there are (I’m sure there are) significant differences between womanist and feminist definitions of “spirituality”—like the question the woman (Jill?) asked me at the WIP the other day.

She is using a lot of white theorists to do this—Carol Christ, Carol Gilligan. Recall, though that this is 1994. Still useful for the definitions and delineations of conversion types/definitions, and of the authoritative statements of where religious history intersects with Af Am and women’s literature history.

Mary Helen Washington: “claiming relational identity as a source of strength” not only claiming personal individualism (41)

Draws parallels between “converting” to feminism and/or civil rights and religious conversions