Mae G. Henderson is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among her most recent publications are the edited volumes Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology and Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies.

CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Revisions and Redefinitions
2. (W)Riting The Work and Working the Rites
3. Speaking in Tongues: Dialectics, Dialogics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition
4. Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text
5. The Stories of (O)Dessa: Stories of Complicity and Resistance
6. "Seen But Not Heard": A Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing
7. Gayl Jones's White Rat: Speaking Silence/Silencing Speech
8. State of the Art: Black Feminist Theory
9. What It Means to Teach the Other When the Other Is the Self
10. Authors and Authorities
11. Nella Larsen's Passing: Passing, Performance, and (Post)modernism
12. Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance
13. Dancing Diaspora: Colonial, Postcolonial, and Diasporic Readings of Josephine Baker as Dancer and Performance Artist
14. About Face, or, What Is This "Back" in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie
IN RETROSPECT
15. Sherley Anne Williams: "Someone Sweet Angel Chile"
16. Bebe Moore Campbell: "Literature as Equipment for Living"
Bibliography
Index

The oral tradition has always played an important role in African American literature, ranging from works such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Toni Morrison's Beloved. These and countless other novels affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary canon. Considering the wide swath of work in this powerful lineage -- in addition to its shared heritage with performance -- Mae G. Henderson deploys her trope of "speaking in tongues" to theorize the preeminence of voice and narration in black women's literary performance through her reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as a critical concept for reading black women's writing dialogically and intertextually.
The first half of the book is devoted to influential works of fiction, as Henderson offers a series of spirited, attentive readings of works by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen. The second half shifts gears to consider the world of female African American performance, most notably in the figures of Josephine Baker and the video dancer. Drawing on the trope of "dancing diaspora," Henderson proposes a model of theorizing based on "performing testimony" and "critical witnessing." Throughout the book, Henderson draws on a history of black women not only in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, but also within the traditions of classical, Christian, African, and black diasporic spirituality and performance. Ultimately, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora provides a deeply felt reflection on race and gender and their effects within the discourses of speaker/listener and audience/performer.