Colored Women Sittin’ on High

Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music

Melanie R. Hill

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469685090, 9781469685083
• eBook ISBN: 9781469685106
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin' on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies.

Pushing against the patriarchal dominance that often exists in religious spaces, Hill argues that Black women’s religious practice creates a “sermonic space” that thrives inside and outside the church, allowing for a critique of sexism and anti-Black racism. She examines literature by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, music by Aretha Franklin and Ms. Lauryn Hill, and sermons by theologians Ruby Sales and Vashti M. McKenzie, and she takes readers into a sermonic artwork of artists, preachers, and freedom movement activists who are, as Hill contends, the greatest “virtuosic alchemists” of our time.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Original-Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• When the Preachers Dance
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Original-HalfTitle Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Left-Handed Sermons in a Right-Handed World: Pauli Murray, Quadruple-Consciousness, and the Art of the Sermon in African American Literature
• Chapter 2: “A Womanist Vibe with a Blues Sensibility”: Disrupting Heaven Through Sermon and Song in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Chapter 3: “Armed with the Word and Shaped by the Blues”: Toward a Womanist Hermeneutic of Regeneration in The Amen Corner and Just Above My Head
• Chapter 4: Tongues on Fire: Black Women and the Making of Sermonic Space
• Chapter 5: We, Too, Preach Freedom: A Symphony of Sermonic Sound
• Chapter 6: “Sound Falls ’Round Me Like Rain”: Toward a Womanist Sermonic Aesthetic in the Sermon-Songs of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Aretha Franklin, Shirley Caesar, Jill Scott, Ursula Rucker, and Ms. Lauryn Hill
• Coda: “When the Women Preach” by Melanie R. Hill “Who Are We?” by Cynthia L. Hale
• Glossary of Musicological Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index