Advance praise for
The Revelations of Asher
“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 strength emerge from the written and
oral narratives of Black women who have experienced terror in love and life. Her work
represents the next chapter of critical feminist epistemologies. Through it, Staples shows us how
some Black women build, maintain, sever, mourn, and celebrate their romantic relationships in
the face of white supremacist patriarchal ideologies and enactments. Staples’ work, without
question, is a once-in-a-generation treasure for all of us, both in and outside of the academy.”
—James C. Wadley, Associate Professor and Director of the Master
of Human Services Program, Lincoln University;
Founding Editor, Journal of Black Sexuality & Relationships; Founding Convenor,
The National Conference of the Association of Black Sexologists & Clinicians
“Jeanine Staples’ masterwork, The Revelations of Asher, begins with a 9/11 era portrait of a
society in pain, and women in terror and love, and launches from that place, by spiral and sidestepping dance, through a twisting tale of fragmented selves and love. This book promises to
meet us where we are, and draws us deeper into central questions for every kind of seeker: Why
do you care? What is your truth about love? Do you think reading and writing can change your
life? In the case of this book, the answer is most certainly, yes.
Staples tells us in the introduction that ‘this book is different,’ and it is. The format will
force, entice, and compel the reader to rethink the story again and again, each chapter adding a
new perspective, a new wrinkle, and a deeper current of revelation. By the end of the book
Asher is an intimate friend. I care for her and her friends, for Staples and her research
participants, and possibly, more for myself. Staples’ protagonist, Asher, is a product and part of
the research process that is at the foundation of this new literacies event. She is both an
everywoman and an amalgam, a storyteller and a story herself, a product of keen analyses of
robust data, and also something completely new and untethered. I found that I could easily read
and re-read this book and each time come away with a new layer of meaning. Dense, but
eminently accessible in its foray into sex, love, friendship, knowledge, truth, terror, and love,
this book challenges you—nay, dares you—as a reader not to look away from love, loss,
brutality, and triumph, in real time.
Staples does not shy away from the terrors and concomitant braveries throughout the text.
The book itself is an exercise in bravery, in writing truths in such a way that multiple
perspectives and points of entry explode meaning. So also, she bravely interrogates the context
of terror—terror in love, terrorism, the Terror and terrors that followed the events of 9/11 and
what these meant for women of color in particular, and what terrors continue to define and
delimit love in women’s lives. Rather than rush to the easy reprisal of piety and loss, her
analyses of 9/11 and the fragmentation and growth that followed for her characters and
participants is located in criticality and acknowledgment of what terror means. Staples explores
what it means to write oneself through and out of terror and into partnership, friendship,
Supreme Love, and healing. She focuses on the importance of stories—both the work of telling
and hearing them, and of finding multiple connections. The Revelations of Asher is an amazing
work of theology and epistemology, literary theory and poetry, employing words, pictures,
music, voicemails, e-mails, movement, playful authorial asides, sound, and even the laws of
physics. It is a window into life and love and dangerous truths for every seeker, everywhere.
Toward the end of the book, an imagined reader asks the author, ‘Are you sure you’re not
Asher?’ Jeanine is not Asher, of course. Yet, Asher is in her and, I wonder, how many of us, as
readers, can see ourselves in Asher, and learn more about our own fragmented selves, and
others’, through Asher’s revelations. A central one is this: Supreme Love saves and heals what
supremacist patriarchies can destroy. In whispers and screams, the literate life can save. It says,
just love, supremely. ‘This is all you have to do.’
This work is a triumph of writing and a fantastic introduction for any reader into the
dazzling terrain of endarkened feminist epistemology. In the tradition of Anzaldua, Lessing,
Lather and others who exploded text genres to tell truths, Staples’ work is electric. This book
was not written to make a reader feel safe, but rather to open the reader up. This book would be
of great interest to scholars in new literacies studies, literacy education, gender and women’s
studies, qualitative research methodology, Africana and Diaspora studies, cultural studies,
liberation theology, literary and feminist theory, and more. Read it. Experience this new
literacies event and be transported.”
—Sally Campbell Galman, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Child and Family Studies
Concentration, College of Education, University of Massachusetts at Amherst;
Editor, Anthropology and Education Quarterly
“Jeanine Staples combines a new literacies approach with an endarkened feminist approach in
order to produce a unique and innovative ethnographic work that illuminates the impact of
supremacist patriarchal ideologies and enactments in heterosexual relationships. She identifies
and defines the seven fragmented selves of ten Black women and critically and creatively shows
how they navigated and negotiated their realities within variously violent, intimate heterosexual
interactions. Staples shows how the seven fragmented selves live in what she calls the Spectrum
of Personhood and form lover identities that are observable in the world. Brilliant. The
Revelations of Asher speaks to women across cultures. Many women will no doubt see parts of
their own psyches (as I did) in this provocative and original ethnographic inquiry. When you
read it you will see some of the ways supremacist patriarchies distort or impede women’s lover
identities and promote terrors in the soul. You will also see a way to overcome those distortions,
impediments, and promotions by making a woman’s quest for Supreme Love in self one of the
highest priorities in womanhood.”
—Lovalerie King, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Director,
Africana Research Center, The Pennsylvania State University
“In The Revelations of Asher Jeanine Staples asks the following question, which those in the
field of new literacies studies (NLS) will find deeply compelling: ‘In what ways can new
literacies studies assist the work of consciousness raising?’ She concludes with references to
the many ways new literacies practices and events enable the location and exploration of
endarkened feminist epistemologies and ontologies that taught her all about terror in love.
Staples is clear that this question, and these explorations, are not marginal to the NLS
approach to research and teaching. Rather, she notes that they are central. She calls these
questions and foci important parts of a new third wave of NLS. She explains that this wave is
constituted by attention to voices and stories of marginalized people and the ways reading,
writing, speaking, and listening are employed as modalities to mediate personal and public
problems. In this spirit, and with great spirit, she contributes to NLS ‘the value of
interdisciplinary lenses and subjectivities.’ This book presents deeply provocative overlaps with
perspectives of social literacies that the reader will find intensely interesting to follow through.”
—Brian V. Street, Professor Emeritus of Language Education, King’s College, London;
Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania;
Author of Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984),
Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy Development (1995),
On Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research (2008),
and Introductory Readings in Anthropology (2013)
“The Revelations of Asher is a major visual, textual, and contextual new literacies event. It
features the voices and stories of Black women. They speak of love, and the relational and social
terrors they experience while seeking love. Their terrors are emotional trauma, psychological
manipulation, physical and sexual violence, and other relationally and socially caustic
experiences. The multi-font text and painted open-mouthed lips, speaking truth to power,
throughout the book will entice readers to experience the text differently by closely following a
particular font-voice. This book is designed for multiple readings and scintillating travels. One
must live with this book, The Revelations of Asher, in different ways in order to understand the
nuanced, delectable subtleties underneath the brazen, layered multi-vocal conversations. The
emotive voices are deeply contextualized in, and representative of, some Black women’s lives
in the twenty-first-century United States.
This book is a new model of arts-based narrative inquiry into epistemological and
ontological frames, particularly for marginalized people. The different voices that knit together
the text are, themselves, temporal (s)paces of knowing and being, leading, and action. They
show palimpsest tracings and (re)evolutions of story. Each voice is represented artistically on
the page. There are nine voices in the text represented in various fonts to denote the emotive
energies that they carry for Black women. Choose your favorite, as I have, and follow her
closely.
The Revelations of Asher offers not only new insights into the psyches of some Black
women terrorized in love, it also raises insightful questions about the intended outcomes of
constructed REALITIES, endarkened feminist knowledge (epistemologies) and ways of being
(ontologies). This book is artistic triumph and emotional and social justice activism manifested.
It is written with empathy, courage, and altruism at its core.”
—Karen Keifer-Boyd, Professor of Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies, School of Visual Arts, The Pennsylvania State University,