AFRICANAMER-GEN-L Archives

From: "Douglas/Ungaro" <>
Subject: Barbara Christian, Caribbean American pioneer - St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 23:35:33 +0200

From poet Opal Palmer Adisa -- Marian Douglas

Barbara Christian, pioneer Black literary feminist critic died on Sunday,
June 25 at 2:45pm at her home from cancer. The first African-American
woman to receive tenure at the University of California, Berkeley and to be
made full professor, she was the recipient of numerous awards and honors.

It is because of her ground-breaking work on African-American women's
writing that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are household names. Author
of two seminal (vaginal) works on Black Feminist Literary criticism, books
on Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, hundreds of essays, Christian is one of
the senior editors of the Norton's African-American anthology of Black
literature.

Barbara Christian lectured extensively throughout the USA, Italy, France,
Japan, India, Tunisia and the Caribbean. A native of St. Thomas, Virgin
Islands, she is survived by her daughter, her parents, her sisters, her
brothers, numerous graduate and undergraduate students, colleagues
and friends.

Barbara Christian was known as a fighter for student rights and various
global and community issues.

Let's chant her into another space and embrace her as one of our ancestors,
paving new paths for us. Ache' One Love Barbara

by Opal Palmer Adisa
CHANTING BARBARA HOME

> you be a talking
> seeing righters
> sister opening
> our eyes and
> reading us like
> a mirror
>
> you be a
> person-loving
> giving sister
> welcoming all
> into a circle
> of knowing
> and friendship
>
> you be a
> generous door-keeper
> fierce tenacious
> laughing and
> dancing us into
> new space
>
> you be
> one of us
> we be
> one of you
> you be
> creating
> space for
> us to be
> free
>
> you be
> our ancestor
>
> Opal Palmer Adisa
______________________
UC Berkeley Biography
http://violet.berkeley.edu/~africam/christian.html
"Barbara T. Christian Ph.D., is Professor of African American Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. Professor Christian earned her doctorate
in Contemporary British and American Literature from Columbia University.

Christian is the author of Black Women Novelists: The Development of A
Tradition-1892­1976,(1980) which won the Before Columbus American Book
Award. It is the first book to explore black women novelists; Black Feminist
Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985), and "A Monarch Note
on Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"(1988). Among her other works is the
edited casebook, Alice Walker's "Everyday Use (1994). She has worked in
curriculum development in the areas of Women and African American Studies
for the last 25 years and was a co-author of the prize winning In Search of
Our Past: 6 Units for the Teaching of a Multi-Ethnic Women's History. Prof.
Christian has been awarded many honors for teaching, in particular the U.C.
Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991.

She has published over 50 essays in books and major African American and
literary journals; has lectured at major universities in the U.S. and
Europe; is the contemporary editor of the first Norton Anthology of African
American Literature(1996); has co edited called Black Subiects in Black and
White: Psychoanalysis, Race and Femimism (1997). At present, she is
completing a book on Toni Morrison for U.C. Press in their American Geniuses
Series."
_______________________

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• Barbara Christian, Caribbean American pioneer - St. Thomas, Virgin Islands by "Douglas/Ungaro" <>