Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music

Melanie R. Hill’s Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music provides a useful interdisciplinary analysis of women’s public speech and performance as it is affiliated with theology and social justice. The book includes discussion of African American literary characters as well as actual women, ordained or not, who have preached and sung their way into local, regional, and national influence. Hill’s argument relies on insights drawn from literary theory, critical race theory, classic and contemporary theology, and musicology. Its coverage sweeps across twentieth- and twenty-first-century America with references to earlier periods. Given the disciplinary isolation within which many scholars work, nearly every reader will find much that is new here. In her introductory chapter, Hill links these disciplines through attention to “sermonic practice.” That is, while most of the figures Hill explores are not literal ministers preaching from a literal pulpit, they all engage with readers and listeners as a preacher might through “prayers, prophecy, and praise” (1). As specifically African American women often communicating with a primarily African American audience, they participate in the ministry of the Black church in America, which understands its call as liberatory. Hill interprets scenes from literature and musical performances as doing the work of sermons, but she also examines sermons—the texts and the delivery—as a literary genre. In this chapter, she devotes extensive space to contextualizing her argument and defining her terms, not only the specifically religious ones such as “sermonic practice” but also more theoretical ones such as “womanist,” a term used primarily within literary studies as an African American elaboration on, amplification of, and critique of feminism. She acknowledges the particularly patriarchal assumptions and practices embedded in many religious traditions, a fact that prompts her analysis and approach.