The Revelations of Asher

This book is a tour de force. The Revelations of Asher brings endarkened feminisms to life in powerful, creative, dare I say revolutionary ways. Reading this book is the kind of literacy event that is at once an invitation to pull up a chair and sit in sacred sister circle, to attend a master class by a brilliant intellectual, and to reflect and revel in the quiet spaces of one's own heart. Jeanine Staples - in text and in tale - shows us the epistemological underpinnings and dynamisms of Black love, the spirit she describes as the Supreme Lover Identity. Through her deft use of metaphor, she shows us, in exquisite detail, the nuanced pieces of Black women's selves in love. They are the selves that Baldwin suggested years ago that we sometimes 'can't live within but are afraid to live without.' This is an epistemic treatise that reads like a novel of Black women's wisdom and magic.
(Cynthia B. Dillard (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana, West Africa), Department Chair and Mary Frances Early Professor of Teacher Education, Director, Ghana Study Abroad in Education Program, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia)
Jeanine Staples sets off to explore post-9/11 popular culture and the ways a group of Black women critically engaged and deployed their own gazes on these representations. Yet, she found another story, one about relationships, community, personal literacy, and the violence and terror that plagues the daily lives of women of color. Heeding Tricia Rose's 2003 call to share voices, create spaces committed to and engaging with black women's voices, in addition to privileging Black women's stories, Staples delivers a myriad of stories and voices in the most unique, dynamic, and unprecedented ways. She highlights multiple literacies, offering readers the chance to become literate on multiple planes. The book itself, and the voices included, spotlight the complex and amazing levels of emotional, relational, and interpersonal literacies within the group of women who took part in the ethnographic inquiry on which this book is based. The book's power, candor, passion, and vulnerability are refreshing; its risks and unique approaches to creative and critical interpretivist work are novel and needed; its complexity in absence of jargon and ubiquitous citations are intensely appealing. Staples' determination to reveal Black women's voices; their love; their truths and literacies; their agency; and senses of community results in a book that will challenge for generations, reminding us all that Black women and girls - their voices, and stories - matter.
(David J. Leonard, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, Washington State University)
The Revelations of Asher is a remarkable book. On the cutting edge of third wave new literacy studies, Jeanine Staples has produced a layered meditation on literacies and selves as always emergent, as deeply relational, and as relentlessly searching. In this shimmering, moving, and beautiful text, Staples invites us to engage in 'literate witnessing' of the searing pains and soaring healing of Black women across a range of texts, breaking down barriers of the social, the personal, and the global. On every revelatory page, she creates a generative space to reimagine love (of each other, of the world, of ourselves) as fertile ground for literacy research in the service of social justice.
(Kelly K. Wissman, Associate Professor, Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning, State University of New York, Albany)
Profound. Compelling. Compassionate... Jeanine Staples has put together a feminist blueprint that meticulously lays a foundation of how resilience and