It was her first semester on campus, and Dianne Stewart realized
that these students were something special.The time was fall 2001,
and the assistant professor of religion was leading her first graduate
seminar at Emory, discussing the seminal “womanist”
work of theologian Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness.
“I had never heard,” Stewart recalled, “a more
erudite discussion, or one as engaging and exciting, of this book.
My first thought was, ‘Your ideas are so compelling, and I
can’t publish them—but we should do something.’”
A year later, that “something” was realized as Stewart
watched six of those students—Renee Harrison, Emily Holmes,
BaSean Jackson, Veronice Miles, Nevell Owens and Meghan Sweeney—each
present a paper on womanism at the Nov. 22–26 meeting of the
American Academy of Religion (AAR), held in Toronto. And not only
did the students receive invaluable experience for a possible career
in the academy, but Williams herself was on hand to respond to the
students’ work.
“They got a standing ovation,” Stewart said with pride.
“They were perfect on that day; the only drawback was that
we only had about five minutes left for questions [after their presentations].”
“’Surprised’ doesn’t quite cover it,”
said Owens, a second-year doctoral student in religion, when asked
how he felt upon learning he and his classmates would get that opportunity.
“Dr. Stewart said, ‘You all don’t know how good
you really are.’”
But Stewart knew. She also knew the students would respond energetically
to Williams’ work. “Womanism” is a term coined
by Alice Walker in 1983 to represent a school of thought for African
Ameri-can women who’d grown leary of the racism they perceived
in the mainstream feminist movement. Whenever a noted feminist happened
to be black, Walker noted, that individual was invariably identified
as a “black feminist.” White feminists received no such
qualification.
“Black women realized that race and gender qualified every
dimension of their life experiences,” said Stewart, now in
her second year at Emory after teaching at College of the Holy Cross
in Worcester, Mass. “Their critical academic discourses began
to examine the meaning of being both black and female simultaneously.
“[Womanism] signifies black feminism,” she continued,
“but some people interpret it to be broader than activism
or even theory, to include the very experiences of black women,
as they negotiate their existence within various contexts of oppression.”
Black women theologians have been the group that has taken the term
most to heart, Stewart said, creating a corpus of work in womanist
theology. First published in 1993, Sisters in the Wilderness
was the first womanist text to challenge a central Christian tenet
(the doctrine of atonement) and created somewhat of a storm in theological
circles.
“Delores Williams is one of the most controversial but competent
womanist theologians,” Stewart said. “It wasn’t
surprising to me that the students loved her work.”
But it was surprising, she said, that the AAR accepted a proposal
from a junior faculty member to have six graduate students present
papers at a major conference. What’s more, Stewart said, at
least one academic publisher has expressed interest in publishing
the students’ work.
“It was the ingenuity of their ideas that encouraged me to
move forward with the proposal,” she said. “Their critical
minds convinced me to do it.”
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