At every step, the book reminds us of the crucial social function of literature—it reflects current cultural understandings and prejudices and has the potential to educate us to overcome those ...prejudices and create new understandings and sympathies. Field argues that these novels use the new “rhetorical techniques of traumatic narrative” (150)—including “complicated narration, fragmentation, temporal discontinuities, and often a lack of tidy resolution”—to depict the delayed, nonlinear, sensorial, and incomplete nature of a survivor’s memory of rape, and to assert simultaneously the traumatic gaps at the heart of such memories and their inarguable realness, in opposition to the myth of “false memory syndrome” (152) that was part of the backlash in the 1990s. ...a common refrain of the book, that these novels’ formal innovations demand “participatory reading” (108) and thus “encourage their readers to become activists,” suggests an as-yet unrecognized way that postmodern fiction insists on doing real-world work, thus challenging misguided notions of it as apolitical and impotent. ...it reminds us that—since roughly one in five women (and one in 33 men) who read Field’s book will be a survivor—every act of reading, writing, scholarship, and teaching can be activism, can be support.
No Lines of Demarcation Alexander, Camille
Caribbean quarterly,
10/02/2021, Volume:
67, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The term 'meridian,' when discussing the Caribbean, poses a debate between perception and reality. The Caribbean is commonly perceived as an earthly paradise by northern visitors, where they can ...escape and pleasure-seek. However, such superficial assumptions about the global south held in the global north ignore the harsh reality of social issues impacting both regions; one of the most pressing being child sexual abuse. An analysis of select texts addressing child sexual abuse — Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (2009), Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Amanda Smyth's Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange (2009), and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) — connects this issue in the global north and south, specifically the US and Caribbean, proving that the meridian separating the two is, in fact, ephemeral ... This article explores literary approaches to addressing child sexual abuse in the global north and south, acknowledging that the issue is prevalent in both regions. By initiating a straightforward dialogue about child sexual abuse, this research hopes to bring the topic to the forefront of Caribbean regional dialogues. Through this process, the goal is to raise awareness and destigmatise those seeking justice while moving legal, social, and familial systems towards holding perpetrators accountable.
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This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the ...development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Whereas I taught Clare's book for the first time in 2020, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is a book that I've been teaching since the 1980s, first at Rice University here in Texas and then after ...1990 in Milwaukee. ...that seemed merely a coincidental personal connection; the theoretical import of her book clearly lay elsewhere, in her understanding of the relation between culture, sex and race, in her revaluation of black women's contribution to culture. ...the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch." The book spends a good deal of time describing in detail aspects of life in South Texas, in Hidalgo County, in the land between the Rio Nueces and the Rio Grande.
Because these genre conventions and narrative restrictions have been largely controlled by white male voices, representations of non-male voices of color in "traditional" literary forms often rely ...heavily on the exploitation ofthat character's oppression-using descriptions of violence and harm (both literal and psychological) as a way to tell a story, rather than giving power to characters that aren't white or male, bell hooks notes this in her striking essay "Postmodern Blackness," where she laments postmodern literary discourse's exclusionary focus on white audiences, even while discussing experiences of difference and "Otherness" (hooks 2318). Substituting female characters or characters of color for the previously white male lead is not enough to disrupt this relationship between the conventions of a text and the exclusion these conventions have historically fostered. According to Chabon, then, these pervasive conventions have been molded into the genre of literary fiction itself and cannot simply be avoided. After being subjected to innumerable traumas as a young black woman (including the loss of her sister and children, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, and everyday racism in her community), Celie finds a unique power in sharing her own voice through the epistolary format, first by writing letters to God and, later, by writing to her sister, Nettie.
Crandall shares his experience of coming into existence with the National Writing Project. As he worked in Central High School's library, Jean and Cassius Clay taught him to float like a butterfly ...but take the sting like a writer. Every mentor he admired across the state offered the same advice: "You need to do the Writing Project as soon as you can. It will change everything. It will save you." He began writing daily with students in all the genres he assigned. Narratives. Essays. Op-eds. Scripts. Commercials. Articles. Poetry. They sketched pages and captured the power of words within these books to teach writing in diverse, inclusive settings, a good fit for all kids. There are three types of experiences for educators to improve their practice: (1) experiences in taking practice public, (2) experiences in taking an inquiry stance, and (3) experiences in networking with diverse others.
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