Sapphire’s Literary Breakthrough

1. Introduction: PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art
Elizabeth McNeil, Neal A. Lester, DoVeanna S. Fulton, Lynette D. Myles

Part I. Transformational Representations

2. Sapphire’s PUSH: Locating Safe Sites for Writing and Personal Transformation
Lynette D. Myles

3. “Bombs Cost More Than Welfare”: Rethinking “Responsibility” in Sapphire’s PUSH

Toni Fellela

4. Multiple Oppressions, “Multiple Consciousness,” and the Spirit of Harriet Tubman in Sapphire’s PUSH

Barbara McCaskill

Part II. Body and Place

5. “Spiky Green Life”: Environmental, Food, and Sexual Justice Themes in Sapphire’s PUSH

Joni Adamson

6. Un-“Freak”ing Black Female Self: Grotesque-Erotic Agency and Ecofeminist Unity in Sapphire’s PUSH

Elizabeth McNeil

7. Sapphire’s PUSH for Erotic Literacy and Black Girl Sexual Agency
L. H. Stallings

8. Awakening to Self-Love in PUSH: Understanding the Significance of Sapphire’s Harlem
Wilfred D. Samuels

Part III. Pedagogy and the Academy

9. Looking for “the Alternative [s] ”: Locating Sapphire’s PUSH in African American Literary Tradition through Literacy and Orality
DoVeanna S. Fulton

10. Deconstructing the “Pedagogy of Abuse”: Teaching Child Sexual Abuse Narratives
Elizabeth McNeil

11. “Rock the Motherfucking House”: Guiding a Study of Sapphire’s PUSH

Nedl A. Lester

12. Why Does Precious Have to Lighten Up or Shuffle? Teaching with Lee Daniels’s “Adaptation”
Christopher Burrell, James Wermers

Part IV. Engaging the Work, Engaging the Writer

13.
PUSHing to Precious: A Compilation and Annotation of Works by and about Sapphire
Eric Parks

Keywords: Literature, North American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Gender Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Literary Theory