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Spirit, Space & Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, edited by Joy James and Ruth Farmer. New York: Routledge, 1993. 293 pp. $17.95, paper.
Reviewed by Jessica E. Thomas Stephens, Eastern Kentucky University.
Each of the several authors in this important anthology is an African American woman who has struggled or is currently struggling against the rigid governing structures and practices at predominantly White universities. Each of their essays presents a narrative that draws upon their scholarship and personal experiences as well as a section of references that reinforce the author's conclusions. By so doing, Spirit, Space & Survival shares candid and informative insights into African American women's struggle against Eurocentric disciplines and White male academic traditions. It also reflects the isolation borne by female African American faculty members and administrators in academe and their yearning to connect with their communities, to establish relationships that include respect for their African traditions, and to acquire the positions of prominence and relevance they deserve.
Editors James and Farmer have woven the voices of women of African descent together into unison to challenge the gatekeepers at predominantly White universities. They have arranged the narratives into three distinct sections and named them, appropriately, "Spirit," "Space," and "Survival." The more theoretical essays appear in the first section of the book. These works strike at the spiritual and theoretical themes that lay the foundation for the more pragmatic contributions that follow. They begin with an essay by Kaylynn Sullivan Two Trees, an African American-Lakota teacher of ceremony and religion, who writes of the lack of ritual and spiritual connection in academe. Two Trees emphasizes that a spiritual connection...