From Harriet Tubman to Beyonc, this is a book for anyone interested in the politics of Black female representation across the arts. In accessible language and through cogent analysis, Janell Hobsons When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination explores African Diasporic womens lives as represented by others and by themselves through paintings, film, novels, music and poetry, to vivify what it means, and has always meant, to be Black and female under colonial eyes. The result is a text as freeing as it is edifying for Black women of yesteryear as of today.
Myriam J. A. Chancy, HBA Chair in the Humanities, Scripps College, and author of Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony and Transmission in the African Diaspora
Janell Hobsons When God Lost Her Tongue is an epic Black feminist story, one that analyzes how Black women artists and writers engage the past in order to imagine more liberatory futures. With deft analysis and dazzling insights, Hobson takes us across space, African Diasporic traditions, and academic disciplines to reveal how Black women theorize their relationship to history and, by doing so, opens up new possibilities and genealogies for our understanding of the Divine, the Black Body, and Freedom itself.
Salamishah Tillet, Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing, Rutgers University, USA, and author of In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece
When God Lost Her Tongue is imperative. It clearly and profoundly demonstrates the liberating power of the Black feminist imagination.
Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
When God Lost Her Tongue
When God Lost Her Tongue explores historical consciousness as captured through the Black feminist imagination that re-centers the perspectives of Black women in the African Diaspora, and revisits how Black womens transatlantic histories are re-imagined and politicized in our contemporary moment.
Connecting select historical case studies from the Caribbean, the African continent, North America, and Europe while also examining the retelling of these histories in the work of present-day writers and artists, Janell Hobson utilizes a Black feminist lens to rescue the narratives of African-descended women, which have been marginalized, erased, forgotten, and/or mis-remembered. African goddesses crossing the Atlantic with captive Africans. Women leaders igniting the Haitian Revolution. Unnamed Black women in European paintings. African women on different sides of the door of no return during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Even ubiquitous Black queens heralded and signified in a Beyonc music video or a Janelle Mone lyric. And then there are those whose names we will never forget, like the iconic Harriet Tubman.
This critical interdisciplinary intervention will be key reading for students and researchers studying African American women, Black feminisms, feminist methodologies, Africana studies, and women and gender studies.
Janell Hobson is Professor and Chair of Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, USA.
Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures
Books in the Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures series exemplify original research in feminist histories that subvert dominant and normative patterns of historical narrative by centering women, gender, and feminist politics. This exciting series delves into womens histories, queer histories, people of colour histories and reclamations of non-western world heritage and cultures through high-quality research. The series aims to utilize intersectional historical analyses to revitalize scholarship in womens, gender, and sexuality studies.
When God Lost Her Tongue
Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination
Janell Hobson
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities
Publics, Counterpublics, and Human Rights
Kanika Batra
https://www.routledge.com/Subversive-Histories-Feminist-Futures/book-series/SUBFEM
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2022 Janell Hobson
The right of Janell Hobson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hobson, Janell, 1973 author.
Title: When God lost her tongue : historical consciousness and the black feminist imagination / Janell Hobson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015939 (print) | LCCN 2021015940 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367198329 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367198343 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429243554 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429513275 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780429516702 (epub) | ISBN 9780429520136 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Women, BlackHistoriography. | Women, Black, in art. | Women, Black, in literature. | Women, Black, in popular culture. | African diasporaHistoriography. | African diaspora in art. | African diaspora in literature. | Feminist theory.
Classification: LCC HQ1163 .H63 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1163 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/896073dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015939
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015940
ISBN: 978-0-367-19832-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-19834-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-24355-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
For my mother Jeanette Hobson and in memory of my grandmother Iris, my great aunt Lizzy, and my aunt Bev, who all disrupted silence with their tongues and kept our histories alive.
Segments from earlier versions of articles appear in the following chapters:
Chapter 1:
Janell Hobson, Black Mermaids, White Fantasies, and the Need for a Black Feminist Imagination. Ms. Magazine (July 11, 2019). Available: https://msmagazine.com/2019/07/11/black-mermaids-white-fantasies-and-the-need-for-a-black-feminist-imagination.
Chapter 4:
Janell Hobson, $20: George Floyd, Harriet Tubman, and the Value of Black Lives. Ms. Magazine (June 16, 2020). Available: https://msmagazine.com/2020/06/16/20-george-floyd-harriet-tubman-and-the-value-of-black-lives.
Janell Hobson, Of Sound and Unsound Body and Mind: Reconfiguring the Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman. Frontiers: A Journal of Womens Studies 40: 2 (2019): 193218.
Janell Hobson, Between History and Fantasy: Harriet Tubman in the Artistic and Popular Imaginary. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 12: 2 (Fall 2014): 5077.