African American Women’s Literary Renaissance: A Template for Spiritual Fiction in the Twenty-First Century?

In Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women, Akasha Gloria Hull revises the usual reading of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of political regress to argue that this period, of diminished militancy as compared to the Civil Rights moment, was actually a time of spiritual maturation “as preparation for grappling with social issues on a more profound level” (Soul Talk, 24). This she saw in the outburst of spirituality erupting concomitantly among African American women in the 1980s. This contribution is an illustration of Hull’s statement, based on fiction by Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, with an emphasis on the narrative nuances in their literary expressions of the spiritual.