Download or read book Conjure Women written by Afia Atakora and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses—are at the heart of this dazzling first novel WINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • NPR • Parade • Book Riot • PopMatters “Lush, irresistible . . . It took me into the hearts of women I could otherwise never know. I was transported.”—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses and Away Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom. Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE “[A] haunting, promising debut . . . Through complex characters and bewitching prose, Atakora offers a stirring portrait of the power conferred between the enslaved women. This powerful tale of moral ambiguity amid inarguable injustice stands with Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An engrossing debut . . . Atakora structures a plot with plenty of satisfying twists. Life in the immediate aftermath of slavery is powerfully rendered in this impressive first novel.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Download or read book The Conjure Woman written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1900 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dark Ladies written by Fritz Leiber and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-10-12 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Conjure wife, Norman Saylor learns that his wife is a sorceress. In Our Lady of Darkness, horror writer Franz Westen searches for the paranormal in San Francisco.
Download or read book Conjuring written by Marjorie Lee Pryse and published by . This book was released on 1985-12-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explains the emergence of black women novelists in contemporary American literature and the cultural and personal influences that made it possible for them to find their literary authority. Beginning with the 19th century origins of the tradition--the autobiographical writings and slave narratives--the volume discusses individual writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Ann Petry and Octavia Butler; the aggregate significance of fiction by black women; and their influence on each other. Novels examined include Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Ann Petry's The Street, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. ISBN 0-253-31407-0 : $29.95; ISBN 0-253-20360-0 (pbk.) : $10.95.
Download or read book Archives of Conjure written by Solimar Otero and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship.
Download or read book The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work. In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman. Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.
Download or read book Conjure Wife written by Fritz Leiber and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2023-03-17 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tansy Saylor is the wife of an up-and-coming young sociology professor at a small, conservative American college. She is also a witch. Her husband, Norman, discovers this one day while rummaging through her dressing table: he finds vials of graveyard dirt, packets of hair and fingernail clippings from their acquaintances, and other evidence of her witchcraft. He confronts Tansy, and manages to convince her that her faith in magic is a result of superstition and neurosis. Tansy burns her charms; and Norman's luck immediately goes sour. He realizes that he had been protected, up till now, by Tansy's charms, and that as a result of his meddling, they are both now powerless to counteract the spells and charms of the other witches all around them.
Download or read book Coolie Woman written by Gaiutra Bahadur and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Download or read book White Houses written by Amy Bloom and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unexpected and forbidden affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok unfolds in a triumph of historical fiction from the New York Times bestselling author of Away and Lucky Us.
Download or read book Black Magic written by Yvonne P. Chireau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-11-20 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure—the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements—from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality.
Download or read book Crossroads of Conjure written by Katrina Rasbold and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the Fascinating World of Southern Folk Magic Featuring an introductory look at Granny Magic, Hoodoo, Brujería, and Curanderismo in the American South, Crossroads of Conjure provides a fresh perspective on folk magic. This authentic and powerful book demonstrates how these systems are interconnected, celebrates their sustainability, and dispels the myths and misunderstandings about them. Learn about each path's beliefs, practitioners, history, and how its traditions are carried on in modern society. Discover the techniques practitioners use for healing, survival, protection, and more. This entertaining and informative exploration of folk magic also helps you determine which practice resonates with you the most.
Download or read book AfterWord written by Dale Salwak and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains imaginary interviews with deceased British and American authors, including Samuel Johnson, Henry James, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, and others.
Download or read book Conjuring Harriet Mama Moses Tubman and the Spirits of the Underground Railroad written by Witchdoctor Utu and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spirits of Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and other heroes of the Underground Railroad guide readers on a magical path to healing, empowerment, and liberation. The historical role that magic and soothsaying played in the Underground Railroad has long been ignored out of fear it might diminish the legacy of Harriet Tubman and other heroes of that time. However, Harriet Tubman was a Conjure woman who relied on her dreams and visionary experiences to lead her followers to freedom. Revered as “Mama Moses,” she, along with John Brown, Mary Ellen Pleasant, and others have been venerated since their deaths. They now have emerged in the 21st century as the pantheon of a new and increasingly popular African-Diaspora tradition. Written by Witchdoctor Utu, founder of the Niagara Voodoo Shrine, this is the first book devoted to the spiritual and magical tradition of the Underground Railroad. In it, the author conjures the spirits of the Underground Railroad, their continued connection to each other, and their “tracks” still leading to freedom from obstacles, bondage, and trouble and tribulations of all kinds. It is a spiritual tradition that is broadly accessible and inclusive, much like the historical Underground Railroad itself, whose participants were black, white, and Native American, male and female, Christians, Jews, Quakers, animists, secret devotees of forbidden African religions, and free thinkers of all kinds. This revelatory book teaches readers how to invoke the blessings of Mama Moses and her followers, access their healing inspiration and magic powers, and seek their own path to freedom.
Download or read book African American Religion A Very Short Introduction written by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first African American denomination was established in Philadelphia in 1818, churches have gone beyond their role as spiritual guides in African American communities and have served as civic institutions, spaces for education, and sites for the cultivation of individuality and identities in the face of limited or non-existent freedom. In this Very Short Introduction, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. explores the history and circumstances of African American religion through three examples: conjure, African American Christianity, and African American Islam. He argues that the phrase "African American religion" is meaningful only insofar as it describes how through religion, African Americans have responded to oppressive conditions including slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the pervasive and institutionalized discrimination that exists today. This bold claim frames his interpretation of the historical record of the wide diversity of religious experiences in the African American community. He rejects the common tendency to racialize African American religious experiences as an inherent proclivity towards religiousness and instead focuses on how religious communities and experiences have developed in the African American community and the context in which these developments took place. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.
Download or read book Working Cures written by Sharla M. Fett and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.
Download or read book Working Conjure written by Hoodoo Sen Moise and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Working Conjure is a blessing. With the increasing commodification of African American and African Diasporic traditions, books about our practices that are simple, direct, and useful seem few and far between. Hoodoo Sen Moise manages to balance a solid delivery on the practice of Conjure with just enough theory to create a foundation to do this spiritual work—which is not, as he also reminds us, spiritual easy—and to continue the work given to us by our ancestors to heal each other and the world we share."—Mambo Chita Tann, author of Haitian Vodou Conjure, also known as Hoodoo or Rootwork, is an old and powerful system of North American folk magic. Its roots derive primarily from West and Central African spiritual traditions but it developed during the slave trade and its purpose at that time was to help ease the terrible oppression experienced by the slaves. Working Conjure explores the history, culture, principles, fundamentals, and ethics of Conjure, while simultaneously serving as a practical how-to guide for actually doing the work. Author Hoodoo Sen Moise has been a practitioner for nearly forty years. In Working Conjure, his first book, he shares the techniques and lessons that will bring Hoodoo alive to those who are new to the practice as well as useful and enlightening information for the adept. In the book he: Explores the primary materials used in Conjure Features spells, rituals, and workings for various purposes Guides readers to learn how to bring this profound school of magic to life “Conjure,” writes Hoodoo Sen Moise, “is not a religion or spiritual path, per se, but rather magic/spiritual work that is done to bring about change in a situation. Whether that situation is a relationship, money, a job, revenge, healing, or cleansing, the fundamental tenet of Conjure is to do work that changes the circumstance.”
Download or read book Creole Conjure written by Christina Rosso and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the veil of tourism, New Orleans drips with hunger, sorcery, and secrets. One of those is Honey Island Swamp, a powerful nexus of magic outside the city limits. Its blue-green water can make you ageless and manifest carnivals out of thin air. Similar to the River Styx, it serves as the gateway between the realms of the living, dead, and in-between. And because of this power, it becomes both a haven and a battlefield for witches, humans, and other magical beings.
