Wom(b)anism: Reading Relationships Between the Community and the Womb in Sankofa, The Women of Brewster Place, and Corregidora

This project attempts to contribute to the various discourses within the black womanist tradition. In 1983, Alice Walker published her landmark collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mother Gardens: Womanist Prose. At the outset of the volume, Walker defines the core concept of womanism. After a poetic four-part definition of the term womanist, Walker concludes by stating, 'womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender' (Phillips 19). Although this analogy is critically engaged, the scholarly discourse that emerged in response to Walker's proposition shapes the intellectual inner workings of this project. Certain established concepts (such as ancestral mediation or the laying on of hands) work in conjunction with my own concepts of 'wom(b)anism' and 'the communal womb' to frame the interpretive discussions throughout these pages. Wom(b)anism and the communal womb both emerge from the black feminist and womanist traditions, especially via the role of ancestral mediation but also within the contested discourses on womanism itself. I apply the two concepts (wom(b)anism and the communal womb) to my readings of Haile Gerima's Sankofa, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Gayl Jones' Corregidora. The relationship between the community and women's wombs across each of these texts construct a narrative that features ancestral mediation (or intervention), various acts of violence committed against women's bodies, and the complicated circumstances through which women heal themselves andtheir communities.

Re-Evaluating Vietnam’s Nghe-Tinh Soviets (1930-1931) using a Historical GIS: Some Preliminary Observations

The Nghe-Tinh Soviets of 1930-1931, a rebellion against colonial authority in north-central and central colonial Vietnam, has received extensive analysis by a variety of commentators and scholars, both Vietnamese and not. Most scholars, Vietnam and internationally, settled on some view of immiseration combined with the presence of pro-communist organizers as the motive forces for the rebellion, but a few have favored questions of political dissatisfaction and local empowerment as underlying motivations for revolt. Until recently, examining the rebellion on a gross scale in order to test either theory has proven difficult, with a surfeit of information but no easy way to process it in order to underwrite large-scale analyses. Del Testa is using a historical GIS (geographical information system) analysis, which blends statistics with digitized maps, in order to display correlations between factors, such as wealth, religion, and so on of those who rebelled in order to reexamine the Nghe-Tinh Soviets movement on a grand scale. His presentation will illustrate some initial findings as well as the techniques used.