This book examines the non-fiction work of literary artist Alice Walker in order to glean values and ethical imperatives for womanist theological and ethical reflection.
Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple is a tale of personal empowerment which opens with a protagonist Celie who is at the bottom of America's social caste. A poor, black, ugly ...and uneducated female in the America's Jim Crow South in the first half of the 20th century, she is the victim of constant rape, violence and misogynistic verbal abuse. Celie cannot conceive of an escape from her present condition, and so she learns to be passive and unemotional. But The Color Purple eventually demonstrates how Celie learns to fight back and how she discovers her true sexuality and her unique voice. By the end of the novel, Celie is an empowered, financially-independent entrepreneur/landowner, one who speaks her mind and realizes the desirability of black femaleness while creating a safe space for herself and those she loves. Through a journey of literary criticism, Dialogue: Alice Walker's The Color Purple follows Celie's transformation from victim to hero. Each scholarly essay becomes a step of the journey that paves the way for the development of self and sexual awareness, the beginnings of religious transformation and the creation of nurturing places like home and community.
Understanding Alice Walker is organized into four chapters: “Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family” (Chapter 1); “The Sight of the Familiar: ‘I Love Myself…’” With an ethic of care, ...Walker represents the interior lives of characters that are often discarded and neglected in society as evident in her early works Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Davis illuminates Meridian’s significance in exploring the cost of survival in the fight to create a beloved community. ...Davis argues that “Meridian may be Walker’s most brilliantly conceived and realized novel” (46) despite its relative obscurity in comparison to The Color Purple.
Jones Medine asserts that Judith Plaskow asks why, when women of color have been members of the editorial board and coeditors of the journal, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) still ...feels like a white container, signaling issues women of color raise about feminism and calling on white-centered feminists to examine how they may crowd out women of color, closing the space for expressing anger, signaling oppression, and demanding response. I was not at the Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) conference; my remarks are about what I heard and my thoughts, addressing: how race marks the line at which white-centered feminism may choose leverage over inclusion; white women's tears as a silencing power move; and Black women, particularly, breaking that silence with anger. A Black woman criticizing Beard's tweet might be seen to cause white women's tears and be labeled an angry Black woman.
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6.
O'CONNOR AND RACE Wilson, Jessica Hooten
First things (New York, N.Y.),
08/2020
Journal Article
"The topical is poison ..." she wrote, "I say a plague on everybody's house as far as the race business goes." Elie describes this as a segregationist vision, "in which people process to Heaven by ...race and class, equal but separate." ...O'Connor is confessing her need to be purged of attitudes she knows to be wrong.
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...a longer elucidation and historicization of LGBTQ politics would have been especially useful for students in the book’s introduction. The Newsies case study emblematizes the tension produced by ...Thomas’s readings of musicals without explicitly queer-identifying characters as spaces to read queer politics and identification in the context of the 2010s—a challenging provocation. Thomas is at his best throughout the book when pushing against attempts to fix definitions of gender and sexuality on and off-stage, which mirrors a (if not the) major paradigm shift in LGBTQ politics themselves, which largely went from viewing identities as fixed to more fluid in the decade beginning in 2010.
Gilkes remembers Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon. Cannon knew how to encourage. She knew how to seize a teachable moment and teach for growth and justice. She knew how to point to people's strengths and ...tell them they could succeed. She knew how to stick a pin in people's conceitedness and selfishness and make you smile while you thought about what she was really saying. She was a gracious, brilliant, beautiful sister who knew how to help you "go gangsta" in a minute.
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This dissertation extends conversations in literacy studies, specifically surrounding the literacy myth, by examining three fictional novels—Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Markus Zusak’s The Book ...Thief, and Susan Froetschel’s Fear of Beauty—which represent literacy and the way it lives. In regards to the ideological versus the autonomous models of literacy, these novels offer useful representations of fictionalized accounts that align with the ideological model of literacy and suggest the violence that is the perpetuation of the pernicious literacy myth. By coining and defining the term “literacy novels,” and laying out the tenets, codes, and markers of such, I argue that these texts illuminate the flaws in the autonomous model. The autonomous model is not only inaccurate but it is a problematic false consciousness used in perpetuating systematic oppression. The examination of these fictional representations of literacy extends understandings of the way literacy lives, and the ways in which it impacts the lives of working-class women. I use this dissertation to look at the rhetoric of illiterate working-class women and their paths to literacy and how acquiring traditional literacy impacts (or rather doesn’t) their lives. I do so through examining the literacy myth, and how it fails the characters repeatedly, in order to draw attention to what is rather than what should be regarding the way literacy lives.
The rise of Donald J. Trump as president of the US and the occurrence at the end of his term of the Jan 6, 2020, insurrection, as a stunningly violent event, have gained increasing traction in ...contemporary public discourses as the harbingers of dramatic societal crises and, arguably, as bellwethers of the disastrous decline of our nation as a noble experiment in democracy. In effect, these two major events are functioning within the confluence of a seemingly endless stream of occurrences--from outrageous efforts to suppress voting rights, to efforts to increase, rather than decrease, guns on the streets, to the persistent resistance to COVID-19 vaccinations in support of public health, to the most toxic public discourses that we have seen in recent history, and more. A frequent mantra has become the statement that these crises are pushing to reflect on where many might be going from this incredibly sobering era forward.
