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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beloved and black prizewinning -- Authorized mentors : to Africa and back in The color purple and Middle passage -- A lesson before dying as style guide -- One to write on : communion without ...consensus in The women of Brewster Place and Jazz -- Hunting inheritance in Song of Solomon and The Chaneysville incident -- Measured achievement : Sent for you yesterday's and Philadelphia fire's failed artists.
Hamamra examines Am I Blue by Alice Walker as an allegory for ecofeminism. The protagonist of which is a horse named Blue, reveals Walker's interest in animals and her criticism of the harsh ways ...human beings treat them. Walker points out that "Am I Blue?" is "about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are". In the same vein, Arisika Razak points out that "Walker's writing consistently indicates that the animal world and its creatures have lives that parallel--in the importance of feeling, suffering, families and wisdom--the human one."
Le rejet de la maternité par l'avortement permet a Xuela de refuser la « greffe » d'un corps étranger dans le sien afin de déranger l'ordre colonial. Sabotant la lignée masculine Xuela refuse d'etre ...une terre fécondable pour autrui. Par ailleurs, Kincaid efface le récit de sa naissance et fait naître sa mere comme personnage.
