Transforming Scriptures

With a topic so large yet so important to understanding currents of American intellectual and social development, one is nearly paralyzed to attempt an analysis. Yet Professor Bassard possesses the knowledge and the confidence to speak strongly in her own voice. She provides readers the helpful organizing principle of a 'continuum of thought,' presented by way of well-researched and thoughtfully articulated arguments set forth in a series of compelling tropes. Her systematic treatment of nontraditional biblical studies scholarship with an ethnic studies engagement underscores an important point relevant to any ethnic or racial study by avoiding an essentialist trap or a universalizing inclusion. This work illustrates that our understanding of the Bible and its relationship to African American literature come from multiple perspectives in constantly evolving endeavors that offer opportunities for reflection and understanding.

* author of Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition *

Katherine Clay Bassard's pathbreaking study opens up an unduly neglected but very important subject. Through close readings of many important works and close reasoning about what she has read, Bassard reveals the multiple, sometimes conflicting, but centrally important engagement of black women writers with the Christian Scriptures. This book should be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, students of religion, and a broad reading public.

* author of God and Race in American Politics: A Short History *

Transforming Scriptures is an important contribution to research on African American women and their writers’ voices and on the cross-cultural phenomenon of inventing and using scriptures. In the creative ways in which Bassard brings the two areas together she broadens and deepens and makes them more compelling. The book is illuminating, daring, and, perhaps, most important, suggests new areas of meaningful transdisciplinary research. I recommend it with enthusiasm.

* editor of Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon *

In this brilliant, cogently argued book, Katherine Clay Bassard elegantly explores the ways in which an array of African American women writers from Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Jacobs to Sherley Anne Williams and Toni Morrison have provided a collective 'literary witness' to respond to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. An astute literary critic, Biblical scholar, and feminist theorist, Bassard here interweaves diverse methodologies to produce a landmark and field-defining work of scholarship.

* Director, Center for African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Princeton University *

Bassard’s Transforming Scriptures will appeal to literary and social historians, to feminists and womanists of all academic disciplines and religious backgrounds, and especially to biblical scholars and theologians. Chiefly, Bassard sets out to demonstrate how nineteenth-century African American women, enslaved and freeborn, transformed the curses of white supremacist Christianity into divine blessings of love and autonomy.

* Signs