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This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias.Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Extending ethical horizons
In Moral Understandings, Margaret Urban Walker not only powerfully argues the case for a feminist ethics of responsibility, but in so doing extends the implications beyond feminism. Viewing moral responsibility from various socially and culturally situated contexts seems common sense enough to all, accept those whoimagine themselves to be in some transcendent position, epistemologically speaking.

What I get from reading Walker is not the idea that we should be reading off ethics from these various positions in the sense of doing the usual (traditional) ethics from many vantage points. That would be relativism. Rather, it seems to me that Walker is arguing that we should be responding from these positions. For Walker, moral responsibility is more an expressive and collaborative exercise than the traditional theoretical activity which focuses only on decision-making. It is this practice of responsibility that maintains the other-directedness of ethics embedded in social and cultural context.

For me, the most surprising aspect of Walker's book has been that so many of my applied ethics research students have found it useful in grounding their work in fields as diverse as disability, vulnerable identities, nursing ethics, GM foods, biotechnology, welfare ethics, and community development.

Soggy relativism
The book rehashes ethical relativism.It tries to bring in some trendy takes on power, feminism, and Foucauld, but it just commits the relativistic fallacy over and over.Author seems unaware of logicalcontradictions. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

For My People
Excellent book (very difficult to find) sold at a very reasonable price.Fast delivery and receipt of item. ... Read more

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Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (43)

Terffic Read
Jubilee was a terffic read.Asbsolute page turner.I was caught up by the first page and couldn't put the book down. The history and the story line of the book made you want more history in to Vyry life as a slave and also as a wife and mother. Her story held your interested. I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates good literature to read.

Walker/Jubilee
Margaret Walker tells the story of her own great-grandparents. In the process, she adds winning scenarios of southern plantation life pre- and post-Civil War, that help us to understand the cultural, economic and political realities that kept slavery and race relations the way they were so relatively recently in our history. Walker presents even the most unpleasant aspects of mistreatment in a way that is not inflammatory or preachy - allowing us latitude to have our own reactions and conclusions... although I must admit tobeing quite angry at some of the unlikeable characters and behaviors.

Excellent. I'd give this work ten stars if I could.

Jubilee and Gone with the Wind
JUBILEE by Margarent Walker should be required reading for all of us regardless of color. I had never heard of this extraordinary book until I was researching famous Alabamians and came across the name of Margaret Walker.This book is the truth compared to Margaret Mitchell's drivel, GONE WITH THE WIND.
Awesome book and a must-read.

A Must Read
Walker takes you on a vivid walk through the life of a Creo slave girl who was born into slavery and must raise her children during the era of Reconstruction and rise of segregated south. Jubilee is truly a must read.

A Book That Should Be Required Reading For All
Jubilee! by Margaret Walker is simply a great book.Well written with character, heart and honesty.Jubilee should be a must read for all high school students.It taught me what slavery was really like.How brutal and cruel our society was and maybe still is toward people of color.Again, a must read. ... Read more

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Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Superb examination of human pain and forgiveness
Margaret Urban Walker's 'Moral Repair' is an excellent philosophical analysis of the moral, ethical and emotional issues underlying the experience of human pain, healing and forgiveness.The 'pain' in question here is both physical (e.g., torture) and emotional (e.g., the pain of belonging to a despised minority, etc.).Walker's study runs the gamut from examining pain at the mundane level of reacting to everyday types of issues - insults, rude or unthoughtful treatment, etc. - to the worst sorts of pain imaginable (e.g., losing a family member to political torture, murder etc.)

The major focus of the book is the 'repair' of moral relationships following physical and emotional assaults both large and small, at the personal or group level.For instance, the author closely examines the history and effectiveness of South Africa's 'Truth and Reconciliation' Commission and other related approaches that attempt to achieve reconciliation following very grievous and long-lasting atrocities.

This book is not only very good (and very interesting) philosophical analysis, it's also good psychology.And it is a very accessible read - it should be readily understandable by non-specialists (such as myself). ... Read more

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Representing an international gathering of scholars, Fields Watered with Blood constitutes the first critical assessment of the full scope of Margaret Walker's literary career. As they discuss Walker's work, including the landmark poetry collection For My People and the novel Jubilee, the contributors reveal the complex interplay of concerns and themes in Walker's writing: folklore and prophecy, place and space, history and politics, gender and race. In addition, the contributors remark on how Walker's emphases on spirituality and on dignity in her daily life make themselves felt in her writings and show how Walker's accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, activist, mother, and family elder influenced what and how she wrote.

A brief biography, an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate, a chronology of major events in Walker's life, and a selected bibliography round out this collection, which will do much to further our understanding of the writer whom poet Nikki Giovanni once called "the most famous person nobody knows." ... Read more

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The hardcover publication of this work resulted in a landmark case, Ellen Wright v. Warner Books Inc. and Margaret Walker.The court ruled in favor of Walker and Warner Books Inc. in a precedent setting opinion.The court's decision, as well as the opinion of the presiding judges is included in this volume.

Customer Reviews (2)

Real Thoughts
This book was hard to keep up with at first I thought it was a biography on Richard Wright.After reading and really getting into the book I then realized that she had a right to speak and write of their relationship. Ifelt that the book was informative and helpful in understanding a differentside of Richard Wright. Everybody has more than one side to them.

With Friends Like These....
Richard Wright, author of NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY, and THE OUTSIDER, is a major American writer.He desrves a major biography.

RICHARD WRIGHT: DAEMONIC GENIUS by Margaret Walker is more like a major hatchet-job.

Dr.Walker is a noted author in her own right, with the bestseller JUBILEE toher credit.She was also friendly with Langston Hughes, Frank Yerby, andJames Baldwin.And she had a three-and-a-half year friendship with Wrighthimself, beginning in 1936.

Much of DAEMONIC GENIUS is based uponWalker's memories of that relationship.That the friendship ended badly(according to Walker, due to Wright) seems to be the central theme of thebook.It's also its central fault.

Walker spends pages and pagesdescribing her feelings over the break up.She then analyzes everyrelationship Wright ever had in the light of those feelings.Along theway, she sprinkles in biographical passages almost as an afterthought.Ifyour interest is in Walker's perspective on Wright's psyche and how itaffected his work, this might be fine.If you're interested in anobjective presentation of Wright's life and work, you will find Walker'spontifications downright annoying.It might even occur to you that Walkeris getting even with the man for some perceived wrong 30 years after hisdeath.

Such are Walker's feelings about Wright that she seemsinconsistent in her conclusions.The first few chapters of her book glossover Wright's upbringing by referring to BLACK BOY, implying that the 1945work covers those years authoritatively.Yet when she comes to discuss thebook itself, she describes it as, "not a book of purely factual andverifiable incidents."There are many such paradoxes in thenarrative.

Too, Walker details many unkind psycholgical insights aboutWright's widow, Ellen.Much has been made of the fact that Ellen tried toput a stop to Walker's book through court action, claiming violation ofcopyright.I personally think she could have made a better case forcharacter assassination.

In short, then, the definitive biography ofRichard Wright has yet to be written.And students of Wright wouldprobably be better off giving RICHARD WRIGHT: DAEMONIC GENIUS a pass. ... Read more

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This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened by court order, documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's secret files enhance this riveting memoir written by a major civil rights figure in Mississippi. He joined his friends and allies Aaron Henry and the martyred Medgar Evers to combat injustices in one of the nation's most notorious bastions of segregation.

In Mississippi, the civil rights struggle began in May 1959 with "wade-ins." In open and conscious defiance of segregation laws, Mason led nine black Biloxians onto a restricted spot along the twenty-six-mile beach. A year later more wade-ins on beaches reserved for whites set off the bloodiest race riot in the state's history and led the U.S. Justice Department to initiate the first-ever federal court challenge of Mississippi's segregationist laws and practices. Simultaneously, Mason and local activists began their work on the state's first school desegregation suit. As the coordinator of the strategy, he faced threats to his life.

Mason's memoir gives readers a documented journey through the daily humiliations that segregation and racism imposed upon the black populace -- upon fathers, mothers, children, laborers, and professionals. Born in 1928 in the slums of Jackson, Mason acknowledges the impact of his strong extended family and of the supportive system of institutions in the black neighborhood. They nurtured him to manhood and helped fulfill his dream of becoming a physician.

His story recalls the great migration of blacks to the North, of family members who remained in Mississippi, of family ties in Chicago and other northern cities. Following graduation from Tennessee State and Howard University Medical College, he set up his practice in the black section of Biloxi in 1955 and experienced the restrictions that even a black physician suffered in the segregated South. Four years later, he began his battle to dismantle the Jim Crow system. This is the story of his struggle and hard-won victory.

Gilbert R. Mason, M.D., continues as a practicing physician in Biloxi. Although a life-long Democrat, he served as a school-desegregation adviser to the Republican administration of President Nixon, as well as a friend, adviser, and appointee of several Mississippi governors.

James Patterson Smith is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published in numerous periodicals, including the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Mississippi History. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

MS Gulf Coast Primer
If you live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and are interested in the Civil Rights movement, this is a must read.

Must read Civil Rights history
This was an excellent read for an in-depth look into the civil rights struggle in the south. From a black doctor's perspective, the book gives the reader a different look at many events in Mississipi that led to integration and equality, and what was sacrificed to attain what we have today.
The book also gives the reader an intimate look into Dr. Mason's life from childhood to the civil rights era, but not beyond. This book would have been better if more information on Dr. Mason had been included. Hopefully, James Patterson Smith will update the forward now that Dr. Mason has passed, and tell us more about what this book is missing, and perhaps add a brief history of his life after the 60's and 70's. (much has been left out.) I would like to have seen Dr. Mason expand upon his own secondary theme of maintaining morals and ethics to reveal a true struggle between his personal life, his political life, and the lives impacted by his choices, good and bad; the legacy Dr. Mason left to ALL of his children was only hinted at in the secondary theme,(much as this sentence does).
Though little long-winded in parts, this is an excellent study of Black history in the south.

A physician of all seasons
Dr. Gilbert Mason has written a book which not only stands as an important literary stone in the foundation of the civil rights movement, but also as a window into the humanity and "higher calling" of being a physician.As a white physician in Mississipppi, I was riveted when I read this book.The hardship which was endured by African Americans during this era is unimaginable, and it was only a generation ago.With eloquence and thouroughness Dr. Mason leads us through the origins of the civil rights movement specifically as it occurred in Biloxi MS. The racial hatred and violence which opposed his nonviolent protests and the fledgling Biloxi chapter of the NAACP is laid out for the reader with very good clarity.When I read this book, the secondary theme also jumped out at me, which was his constant pusuit of being a physician , specifically maintaing high degree of ethics, morality, and care for all patients black are white during this period of tribulation.I highly recommend this book to all. ... Read more

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Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movementÂ--distinct from the white Populist movementÂ--in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1898, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers created their own organizations and tactics primarily under black leadership.

As Black Populism grew as a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats and constituent white planters and local merchants. African Americans carried out a wide range of activities in this hostile environment. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agrarian legislation; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict lease system, segregated coach boxes, and lynching; demanded black jurors in cases involving black defendants; promoted local political reforms and federal supervision of elections; and ran independent and fusion campaigns.

Growing out of the networks established by black churches and fraternal organizations, Black Populism found further expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and the Colored Farmers Alliance. In the early 1890s African Americans, together with their white counterparts, launched the PeopleÂ's Party and ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party. By the turn of the century, Black Populism had been crushed by relentless attack, hostile propaganda, and targeted assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers of the movement.The movementÂ's legacy remains, though, as the largest independent black political movement until the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

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Margaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim.

In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, Conversations with Margaret Walker captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests. The same erudition, wit, and love of language on display in Jubilee comes through in conversations, as well as her sense of moral authority--imbued by a resonant Christian humanism--and her attention to historical detail.

In a long 1972 conversation with fellow poet Nikki Giovanni, Walker argues about the tribulations and triumphs of motherhood, the presence of black women in literature, and race relations in American culture from 1900 to the present. With Marcia Greenlee in 1977, she talks extensively about her family's history and her love of botany. In several of the interviews, her friendship with Richard Wright rises to the forefront. Even in her interviews with Claudia Tate and John Griffin Jones, in which the interviewers try to direct the conversations toward the mechanics and thought processes behind Walker's writing, the talks often sweep into broader issues of African American culture, family history, and the past's influence on the present.

This collection amply shows that Margaret Walker was a writer who considered her work to be deeply influenced by the culture around her. She viewed her writing as part of her larger life and not separate or distanced from her existence. Bracingly direct, witty, and oddly charming, the writer in Conversations with Margaret Walker is complicated, passionate, forceful, and piercingly intelligent.

Maryemma Graham, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, is the co-editor of Conversations with Ralph Ellison (University Press of Mississippi). She also edited How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature by Margaret Walker, and On Being Female, Black and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932­1992. ... Read more

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Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives.

Establishing their courtships, often across plantations, the enslaved men and women of antebellum North Carolina worked within and around the slave system in order to create and maintain meaningful personal relationships that were both of and apart from the world of the plantation. They claimed the right to participate in the social events of courtship and, in the process, challenged and disrupted the southern social order in discreet and covert acts of defiance.

Informed by feminist conceptions of gender, sexuality, power, and resistance, the study argues that the courting relationship afforded the enslaved a significant social space through which they could cultivate alternative identities to those which were imposed upon them in the context of their daily working lives. ... Read more

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Nancy Berke studies the poetry of three radical women authors who wrote in the first half of the 20th century about the compelling issues of their times: the depression, working-class movements, the Great Migration, and race discrimination.

In a clear and concise style, Berke offers readers a theoretical framework, historical overview, and careful reading of the poetry of Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker. She describes the rich social, historical, and political context of their work, making the book an in-depth study of the gender issues, radical politics, and poetry of the modern period, 1915-1945.

With Walker, the best known of the three poets, Berke focuses on the writer's contributions to African American modernism during the depression and World War II. With Ridge and Taggard, she explores how the neglect of these poets, particularly by feminist literary criticism, has seriously altered awareness of the social and political concerns of feminist modernists. The work of these politically committed leftist poets, accompanied by Berke's discussion of their influential writing, advances the ongoing conversation of modernism as a highly contested literary and cultural movement.

Paying particular attention to the issue of class, she stresses the need for modern American poetry to move beyond aesthetic biases and place greater importance on social categories such as race, class, and gender. Though written primarily for literary scholars, the book will appeal to general readers interested in gender issues, politics, poetry, or the history of the left or of feminism. ... Read more

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What role did religion play in sparking the call for civil rights? Was the African American church a motivating force or a calming eddy?

The conventional view among scholars of the period is that religion as a source for social activism was marginal, conservative, or pacifying.

Not so, argues Johnny E. Williams. Focusing on the state of Arkansas as typical in the role of ecclesiastical activism, his book argues that black religion from the period of slavery through the era of segregation provided theological resources that motivated and sustained preachers and parishioners battling racial oppression.

Drawing on interviews, speeches, case studies, literature, sociological surveys, and other sources, Williams persuasively defines the most ardent of civil rights activists in the state as products of church culture.

Both religious beliefs and the African American church itself were essential in motivating blacks to act individually and collectively to confront their oppressors in Arkansas and throughout the South. Williams explains how the ideology of the black church roused disparate individuals into a community and how the church established a base for many diverse participants in the civil rights movement.

He shows how church life and ecumenical education helped to sustain the protest of people with few resources and little permanent power. Williams argues that the church helped galvanize political action by bringing people together and creating social bonds even when societal conditions made action difficult and often dangerous. The church supplied its members with meanings, beliefs, relationships, and practices that served as resources to create a religious protest message of hope.

Johnny E. Williams is an associate professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. His work has been published in Sociological Forum and Sociological Spectrum. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Journal of Pan African Studies, published by Journal of Pan African Studies on June 1, 2008. The length of the article is 4520 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: This article attempts to contribute to the scholarship on Margaret Walker's Jubilee, ancestor of a wave of neo-enslaved narratives and African-American historical fictions, by shedding more light on the context of its development. While most critics implicitly tie the development of Walker's historical novel to the sixties, the text is a product of the thirties which gave impetus to the revisionist movement reclaiming African-American history.

Citation Details
Title: Reclamation in Walker's jubilee: the context of development of the historical novel.(Margaret Walker)(Critical essay)
Author: Babacar Dieng
Publication: Journal of Pan African Studies (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2008
Publisher: Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume: 2Issue: 4Page: 117(11)

Article Type: Critical essay

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more