Books
Through reflections on her own life, anthropologist Dr Linda Jean Hall draws on traditions of African storytelling to explore the question of how systemic fear affects the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afro American experience. By using the framing of pandemic waves - a concept all too familiar in the wake of COVID-19 - Hall employs a personal lens to parse out the implications of different "waves of fear" through impactful stages of her life, allowing readers to examine the shifting relationships that define Blackness and survival.
General readers will be engaged in Gifting resilience: A pandemic study of Black female resistance which is a work that is already formatted to be ideal classroom reading for students of Black studies, African American studies, and related courses, as well as for students of feminist and womanist studies, gender studies, cultural studies, history, sociology and anthropology.
SUMMARY: Unflinchingly honest, this book gives a human face to viewpoints and ideas that originate deep within the complex and diverse African Diasporic lived experience.
The Transnational “Good Life” is an ethnographic study of the founding and maintenance of social organizations by emigrants from Ecuador in politically contested U.S. public spaces. By following in the footsteps of W. E. B. Du Bois who coined the term “double consciousness,” this book posits that racialization, an inherent characteristic of Global Apartheid, uniquely influenced the construction of complex Ecuadorian migrant identities in the U.S. The thematic focus is on the intersection of the empowerment produced in the social clubs with the desire of individual members to acquire the American Dream and the good life. This is an “anthropology of the good,” which brings to the forefront the lived experiences of immigrants claiming a high level of pre-migratory preparedness and success in the U.S. The Transnational “Good Life” is an analysis of evolving relationships within and outside the loosely connected network of Ecuadorian social clubs in the unique cultural milieus of Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City.
Current Book In Publication
The first of two editions of a memoir, Three Rivers Crossed, was officially launched June, 2011. The multiple faceted purpose of the series serves to provide a colorful account of the Afro-American experience during the 1960's and 1970's. The accounts are geographically dispersed between events in Northwestern Pennsylvania and culminate with a glimpse of the black experience in Eastern Tennessee. Topics of interest include: history, race, ethnicity, female studies, and other social science areas of study.
The good intentions and needless secrets surrounding an unwanted birth become a negative and cleverly woven heroic tale utilized to mold a mid-20th century Afro-American female and prepare her to take the next step up the ladder to the American Dream. The community of her childhood is forever memorialized as the Village within a diverse neighborhood on the Northwest side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This memoir is a tribute to the shared mission of the Afro-American residents of the Village to save every child despite the confusion of the black experience within a nation undergoing war, death and revolution. It is also a personal, frank and sometimes humorous account of a determined search for identity which moved forward even when confronted with self-imposed obstacles, deceptions and blatant untruths.
More Information about Three Rivers Crossed and Linda Jean Hall can be found here.
Three Rivers Crossed Important Past Events
Information and video from the CAUSE event can be found on this link.
Santa Barbara Women's Literary Festival 2014
More Information about this festival can be found at this link
Panel at the Annual Women Read/Women Write Book Fest
Event took place on March 29,2014 (Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall in Pittsburgh, PA)
Live TV Interview on the Lynne Hayes Freeland Show
KDKA-TV
Interview from March 29, 2014
Radio Show Interview with the book’s author Linda Jean Hall
Linda Jean Hall is the author of Three Rivers Crossed, a memoir written to honor the memory of her son and the members of her childhood community in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
Approaching her own community and her own writing process as an anthropologist has given her some unusual perspective on the writing process. The interview can be found here:
Linda Jean Hall on witnessing places, writing from the gut (April 29, 2014)