A TRIPLE-TWINED RE-APPROPRIATION: WOMANIST THEOLOGY AND GENDERED-RACIAL PROTEST IN THE WRITINGS OF JARENA LEE, FRANCES E.W. HARPER, AND HARRIET JACOBS
This essay argues that nineteenth-century black women writers employed womanist theological thought to argue that African American women's writing challenged "traditional doctrines" that characterized black women's racial and gender oppressions as part of God's divine racial-gender hierarchy. By placing the works of Jarena Lee, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Harriet Jacobs in conversation with womanist theological reflection, this essay makes more explicit how these black women's writings were a part of the larger dialogue in which more vocal and visible activists—including Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth—participated, and reveals how black women's writing has shaped American politics and political culture. Lee, Harper, and Jacobs purposefully appropriated the literary conventions of the day to foreground the transformative power of writing as a form of direct and indirect political action. The subsequent analysis of Jarena Lee's The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1849), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's less-known poem "Moses: a Story of the Nile" (1869), and Harriet Jacob's famed Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861) argues that in a triple-twined re-appropriation of language, literary convention, and biblical metaphor, black women not only inserted themselves in African American (male), women's (white), and American (white male) literary histories. They also conceptualized black women's civil rights in ways that displaced the centrality of the black male subject in African American political and cultural histories. By turning to nineteenth-century black women's writings, contemporary womanist theologians further glean how black women's writing historically has envisioned the black enfranchisement movement in terms that reveal black women's active roles in shaping black community's political possibilities
Article, 2013