In her autobiographical novel, A Question of Power (1973), Bessie Head identified a dialectical bind in the language and imagery of decolonial and nationalist movements across Africa at the time. I ...contrast the novel's treatment of such language with Head's observations of the agricultural development projects in which she participated during her time in Botswana, which are distinguished by a relational responsiveness across difference, reflected in their responsiveness to the natural environment. Her involvement as a participant-observer, I argue, allowed Head to develop a unique Afrocentric philosophy and poetics, distinct from and often at odds with the language and ethos of campaigns for national liberation. This poetics is what I term "absorbent": defined by its capacity for sustaining and responding to difference. However, although Head attempted to transcend the dialectical discourse of nationalism, I show that this effort towards transcendence sometimes risked intellectual deflection, which ultimately reinforced a conservative model of global politics and economics.
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Hemmati discusses self-consciousness in Alice Walker's the Color Purple and Irigaray's Feminine Divinity. Alice Walker, An African-American female writer, was influenced by women's spiritual movement ...of the late 1970s and early 1980s when black women were routinely oppressed by black male society. She raises not only the question of race but also gender oppression in her novel as "it had been the crucial issue against which black women were protesting in the 1970s." She has described the high rate of sexual violence on black women, and the male's control over their sexuality. As a revolutionary writer, Walker gives voice to black women who are oppressed by black men. She discusses the oppressed black women who fight to reconstruct their own world and their own subjective identity and to achieve self-consciousness and liberation.
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33.
An Army of Spiritual Teachers Gleibermann, Erik
World literature today,
11/2018, Volume:
92, Issue:
6
Journal Article
In Zora Neale Hurston's canonical novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, on her return from the destruction of the hurricane in the Everglades and the death of her beloved Tea Cake, contemplates ...her experience and confides in her best friend Pheoby: "yuh got tuh go there tuh know there". "Going there" and "knowing there" stand for the experience that transcends words, a journey that can be traced on a map but is individually experienced and requires empathy, a listener to understand. Bridging the geographical distance suggested by Janie's return, Pheoby bears witness to Janie's story, her testimony, affirming her experience. In turn, Hurston's novel allows readers, distanced in time and place, the chance to cross borders of imagination, creating the kind of abiding bond that literature, at its best, engenders. This reading draws upon recent studies of narrative empathy, with a focus on the significance of testimony in Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's use of literary techniques--vivid imagery and characterization, a style that combines the written and spoken, and settings that are both familiar and defamiliarizing--captivate and move the reader to listen, empathize, and act.
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This article studies love as a distinct, transformative, and radical Black feminist politic. By closely sitting with the work of Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, this article treats ...love-politics as another political tradition that has emerged from within the parameters of Black feminist thought, one that challenges the political tradition most closely associated with Black feminist thought: intersectionality.
The present paper argues that Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) embodies Black Feminist Autoethnography that critiques and commemorates her spectacular art of constructing cultural-autonomy within the ...marginal sphere of Willow Springs, permitting the inhabitants, especially the women of the island, to shield their individual identities, as well as combat the hegemonic pseudo power-structure. By eliminating the conventions of white contemporary bureaus, and alternatively putting up rational sets of credence, ethics, and practices, the novel embellishes the rhetorical manufacturing of cultural-autonomy, ultimately encapsulating the ethical-cum-mythical undertakings of the Black America. This effectuation of their own ethical reservoirs by these resistive cultures eventually helps in defending their distinctiveness and autonomy, in order to give a substitutive formulation to their standpoints, as well as to provide the associates of the white hegemonic power structure with an insightful critical assessment of their own ethnicity. Further, the paper bluntly negates the conjecture of ethnographic convictions, and relentlessly confronts the colonizing supremacy of objectified fractional truths because objectivity as well as aloofness vis-a-vis the field setting ultimately results in a failure to gather any information and statistics worth examining, as offered through the prototypical narrative of Reema's Boy and George. Instead, using autoethnographic subjectification as an arsenal tool, the chapter contemplates over the magnitude of fabricating cultural-autonomy that empowers the quintessential women characters of Willow Springs, like Mama Day, Sapphira Wade, and Cocoa, to defy the etiquettes of an obsolete universalism, and to construct their distinct standpoints.
The Color Purple is one of the most outstanding novels by an Afro-American author Alice Walker. She shot to fame with the publication of this novel in 1982. It is tale of victimization, sufferings, ...suppression and self-realization of fourteen years old black girl in Afro-American society. Having faced horrible trauma throughout her life the girl holds her later life and establishes her own identity. This paper is an attempt to unravel the different thematic issues of the novel which Alice Walker tries to bring out, be it a rigid patriarchy, racial discrimination, sisterhood or lesbianism. It unravels how self-determination can turn victorious and how one can overcome difficulties.
Esse artigo objetiva compreender a relação entre diferentes tonalidades de pele negra e distintos processos de racialização discursivizados no texto "If the present looks like the past, what does the ...future look like?" da autora negra estadunidense Alice Walker, apontado por textos produzidos nas mídias negras brasileiras como referência para a definição de colorismo como "a diferença de tratamento entre pessoas negras baseada unicamente na cor da pele". Para tal fim, abordo as diferenças entre as organizações raciais brasileira e estadunidense na relação com o processo de interpelação ideológica e de produção discursiva. As análises da obra de Alice Walker apresentadas demonstram a impossibilidade de compreender o colorismo por uma perspectiva racial que desconsidere os atravessamentos de gênero, classe e sexualidade que constroem feminilidades e masculinidades negras em contextos de histórico colonialista, o que impôs a necessidade de adotar uma perspectiva interseccional de análise discursiva.
