I received with a mixture of triumph and sadness the news that the pioneering article of mine linked below has been published.
Triumph at the emergence of this distillation of years of work at times persisted in through challenging controversies about the project itself and within personal difficulties in which the work provided succor and a deep sense of purpose.
Triumph at its discussion of the creativity of female spiritual thinkers and practitioners working on female centred spiritualities, some of which figures I am the first to write about on any platform, talk less in the highly prestigious context of publication with the highly esteemed academic publisher Palgrave.
Triumph in its representing my contributions to the relatively new strategy of using social media as a source of information for scholarship and the even newer approach of employing social media as a scholarly platform, since a number of the texts referenced and linked are essays I published on Facebook, one of the two social media spaces that are my central publishing zones, all others, including academic publishing, such as the one linked here, being complementary.
Triumph at working with the omnivorous scholar Toyin Falola, who, with the luminous Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, are the editors of the book.
Sadness because the person who wrote the essay in the book no longer exists while the person composing this framing of the essay within a biographical landscape is the womb where the new identity of the essay writer is being formed, an identity shaped in vision and seeking, perplexity and pain, power and blindness, confusion and soaring potency.
I am a matrix of powers, terrestrial and cosmic, temporal and eternal.
How may this cauldron of forces, the brew of witch mothers and wizard fathers, scion of ancient lineages shimmering within my blood, ancestral continuities both biological and ideological, how may this pot incandescent seat within the matrix of space and time?
That is the question, Toyin, that is the question.
The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
Abstract
This chapter explores the contributions of six women to the philosophical and spiritual significance of the feminine through the lens of female biology. These women are Susanne Wenger, Ayele Kumari, Bello Olarinmoye, Mercedes Morgana Cordova, Tiara Kristine, and Nyornuwofia Agorsor, who have either immersed themselves in African spiritualities or are African-American or African but define themselves through either African cosmologies or a blend of African and non-African spiritualities.
The focus of the chapter is on African and African-American thought, defined in terms of either the cultural sources of the ideas discussed or the ethnic identities of the artists and thinkers in question, or both. The novel formulations developed by the women amplify the positive values of ancient conceptions, particularly from Nigeria's Yoruba spirituality, and strive to eliminate the negative, as these culturally grounded perspectives intersect with spirituality in general.
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