African American Female Mysticism: The Nineteenth-Century Contextual Landscape

Abstract

The religious quest of African American women is fundamentally a search for place and space. These movements involve the work of constructing emancipatory identities in the face of gender and racial stereotypes of blackness and femaleness. For nineteenth-century African American women this meant having to navigate competing notions of feminity and hierarchical notions of race entrenched within the cultural and social institutions that affected their lives, their communities, and the nation. It also meant working to transgress the boundaries of externally and structurally circumscribed roles for black women while struggling to inhabit complex subjectivities within public and private domains. In exploring the Afra-American¹ search for place and space, it is important to note that the contextual landscape of black female social existence in nineteenth-century North America was shaped by “systematic attempts” to “physically, psychologically, culturally, economically, and spiritually” subjugate African American people. ² Moreover, “[l]egally and or socially sanctioned forms of violence, intimidation and exploitation (including rape, lynching, beating, and economic deprivation) were tools designed” to silence and control African American women, and perpetuate the dehumanizing system of slavery and the suppression of free blacks. ³