Reviews
"An important work because it expands our knowledge of the syncretism in the fictions of Hurston, Morrison, Adisa, and Danticat, and recognizes the vitality of the West African worldview as a means of resisting Western paradigms which are inimical to black female subjectivity. Weir-Soley's scrupulous deconstruction of the assumptions that surround black female sexuality has many implications not only in literature, but also in how we look at each other and ourselves in the mirror."
--GeoffreyPhilip.blogspot.com
Captures one of the most challenging concerns of scholars who engage black women's literature, culture, and theory: the ongoing quest to locate a form of black female sexual agency that neither withers in the chilly lake of sexual repression nor explodes in the heat of hypersexual stereotypes.The insights revealed in Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings provide an instructive and necessary intervention in where and how we locate, finally, a liberatory erotics of black female expressivity.
--MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
"Weir-Soley's underyling promise is that the divorce in Western cosmology of the body and the mind, the physical and the spiritual, leads to disruption and imbalance in the female psyche, and that in order to regain equanimity (black) women must incorporate their physical bodies and sexual expression into an acceptance of their entire being."
--African American Review
"In this provocative yet diffuse text, Donna Aza Weir-Soley articulates the importance of embodied, erotic spirituality to black female subjectivity and empowerment."
--Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature