Editors’ Introduction

From weaving to literature to film, the essays in this issue treat all manner of texts, textures, and textuality from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. While one essay encourages the tactile sense, another stirs the visual as it moves back and forth between the written text and visual narrative. Turning South in order to recover the self are the themes that bookend this issue. An economy of style and elegant expression draw the essays together in a cohesive exploration of black women’s writing/weaving of alternative narratives of the self and the black female body being written and screened for the actualization of others.