Sweetwater : Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Black Studies and Critical Thinking .43) (2012. XXI, 129 S. 225 mm)

This book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South. This book captures the artistry, strength, hope, sound, language, and creativity shared by first-hand accounts of black women in a familial village community in North Carolina. Sweetwater is about the black female experience as it relates to friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, raising children, and everyday survival. Written from field notes and memory, the author combines narrative and autoethnography to weave her own experiences as a rural black girl into the story, revealing the complexities of black women’s lived experiences and exposing the communicative and interpersonal choices black women make through storytelling. Narrative inquiry and black feminism are offered as creative educational tools for discussing how and why black women’s singular interior lives are culturally and globally significant.