| This study examines how racialized knowledge defines itself through the black feminine body and how such knowledge operates within the once-occurrent context of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century male writers, nineteenth-century African American women's texts, and the three novels of Annie Green Nelson.;The texts analyzed in chapters one and two concentrate on the theoretical foundation for the remaining chapters, first by summarizing the process of literary voicing in the African American practice of chiasmus and second by examining the homosocial constructs that shaped and informed the social construction of knowledge. How European efforts to make whiteness the ubiquitous, omniscient author who denominated the world physically, intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually is clarified in these chapters.;Chapters three through five focus on the architectonics of nineteenth-century African American women writers and Annie Green Nelson, twentieth-century demonstrating specific constructs of black women's ways of knowing. The specific lives, classified by spiritual awakening, of these black women writers focus on what they believed best defined them and best bespoke the knowledge about them that they wanted disseminated. Their lives epitomize how architectonics work: postupo (authoring of action of process), performance (life as event), answerability (no alibi for being), once-occurrent event of Being, participative thinking, and aesthetic seeing. Chapter six suggests reasons for teaching African American nineteenth-century women's texts. |
