Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History

By Janet Gabler-Hover

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813121434
• ISBN13: 9780813121437
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Book!

This book seems to be a tribute to Black womanhood. It is a lifting of the veil of invisibility, to show an infrastructure, on which much of this country's literature has been written. This author gives voice to a history that exposes the appropriation of more then just bodies. She writes into history from an obscured position that of the female, revealing the deep hidden story of the way things were, acknowledging her story. It is like the backbone to the imagination and depth of American literature is being revealed. This book outlines such a delicate, intricate, detailed thing, the evacuation of wholeness, the extraction of worth from the Black woman, to be grafted onto White women, while at the same time making Black women a depository for the myth of sexual deviant, the origin of impurity. I wrote in all in the margins of the book! I really enjoyed the careful unfolding of the history of women (white) meticulously layered within of the racial constructs of the Black female image. The analysis of the Biblical story of Sarah is thought provoking and painful. The process of the devaluation of Black womanhood is so insidious, so detailed, so diabolical, and so "well" efficiently done! I love the last sentence of the first paragraph on pg. 59! It is so small, such a little detail with huge ramifications! It is the difference. It is everything in such a gentle, seemly benign shift. It is only the difference between the happy slave relieved of that pesky responsibility of freedom and the oppressed masses laboring to death under tyranny! I enjoyed the book! I loved what I read, I savored the voice the book valued and recognized its uniqueness. It made me envision the possibility of a different path of history and the possibilities of a different future! Clearly one of the ways to achieve real progress, a greater revelation of truth is for readers, all readers, to read and reevaluate "the story" they have been given. As the author so clearly states, the path to understanding, to real comprehension lie in, an aesthetically removed, analysis of the concepts and ethics inherent in the foundation of the written word. This concept may be applied to all readings, in by pasting the pleasure, in resisting the seduction of the story a reader is gifted with a more sophisticated, inclusive appreciation of the ideologies hidden within a text.