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"Their Past in My Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic

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The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Fall 12-2010 "Their Past in my Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Freeman, Williamenia Miranda Walker, ""Their Past in my Blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's Response to the Black Aesthetic" (2010). Dissertations. 458. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/458 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi “THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”: PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman Abstract of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2010 ABSTRACT “THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”: PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman December 2010 Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women’s sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. An examination of their works reveals the need for additional critical inquiry into the Black Arts era. More importantly, this study suggests that these writers are deserving of more prominent placement within the African American literary canon as the thematic content of their novels presages that found in the works of more canonical writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. ii COPYRIGHT BY WILLIAMENIA MIRANDA WALKER FREEMAN 2010 The University of Southern Mississippi “THEIR PAST IN MY BLOOD”: PAULE MARSHALL, GAYL JONES, AND OCTAVIA BUTLER’S RESPONSE TO THE BLACK AESTHETIC by Williamenia Miranda Walker Freeman A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved: ____________________________________ Director ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Dean of the Graduate School December 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Sherita Johnson, and the other committee members, Drs. Philip Kolin, Ellen Weinauer, Linda Allen, and Candice Love- Jackson, for their advice and support throughout this project. I would especially like to thank Dr. Sherita Johnson for her willingness to serve as chair and for her guidance. I would like to extend an additional word of thanks to Dr. Candice Love-Jackson for her faith in me and for her words of encouragement during those trying times. I also thank the Andrew W. Mellon Programs for awarding me a United Negro College Fund Mellon Faculty Doctoral Fellowship that enabled me to spend a year away from my teaching duties to write this dissertation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................1 Notes II. “BOURNE-FREE”: MERLE KINBONA, POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND THE COMMUNITY OF BOURNEHILLS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S THE CHOSEN PLACE, THE TIMELESS PEOPLE .....................................29 Notes III. “WHOSE WOMAN IS YOU…I [AIN’T] NO CORREGIDORA”: REDEFINING BLACK WOMAN’S SEXUALITY IN GAYL JONES’ CORREGIDORA .........................................................................................77 Notes IV. “HAVEN’T I SEEN YOU SOMEWHERE BEFORE?”: CONFRONTING AND RECONCILING A SLAVE PAST IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED .................................................................................................124 Notes V. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................165 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................173 iv 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION [The black woman] is a college graduate. A drop-out. A student. A wife. A divorcee. A mother. A lover. A child of the ghetto. A product of the bourgeoisie. A professional writer. A person who never dreamed of publication. A solitary individual. A member of the Movement. A gentle humanist. A violent revolutionary. She is angry and tender, loving and hating. She is all these things—and more. “The Black Woman”— Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman (1970) Taken from the eponymous anthology, Bambara names and defines “the black woman.” A compilation of poetry, short stories, and critical essays, The Black Woman is important in its efforts to have black women validate their own Self (-ves) at a pivotal moment for understanding the politics of identity in the latter half of the twentieth century. The collection problematizes the interplay of race, class, and gender from the perspective of black women.1 The text signals an effort on the part of black women to assert their voices in racial and gendered discourses to which they had been historically marginalized. Though black women novelists, dramatists, and poets had long established a tradition of addressing these issues in their literary texts,2 1970 proved a watershed year in propelling their concerns to the forefront as these writers seek inclusion into the social, cultural, and political discourses (Civil Rights and Feminism) that had at times excluded them and at others kept them from moving from “margin to center.”3 Seemingly, race and gender certainly would serve as point of entry, but both movements excluded black women’s direct involvement. Though black women had a visible presence, their concerns were ignored. In essence, “all the women were white and all the blacks were men”4 as iconic representations of these cultural movements. Audre Lorde in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” posits that “black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, 2 although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression [they] have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community...”(118). Though her original thesis centers on the inclusion of black lesbians into the collective black community, her argument offers a method of addressing the concerns of all black women. Simply put, though black men and women suffer from racism, the burden they bear is different because of gender conditions. Black Nationalist ideology that privileged racial patriarchy did not consider that black women also suffered from sexist oppression. This failure to recognize black males’ culpability as potential oppressors results in the dismissal of black women’s concerns and tries to limit their agency. As bell hooks cogently observes: Black male leaders of the movement made the liberation of black people from racist oppression synonymous with their gaining the right to assume the role of patriarch, of sexist oppressor. By allowing white men to dictate the terms by which they would define black liberation, black men chose to endorse sexist exploitation and oppression of black women. They were not liberated from the system but liberated to serve the system. (Ain’t I 181) My purpose is to interrogate the exclusion and marginalization of black women in Black Nationalist and Aesthetic discourses by examining how black women writers of the 1960s and 1970s challenge the ideologies that were ostensibly about racial uplift and unity but deny the explicit participation of black women. I offer Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones and Octavia Butler as they “dare to verbalize [black women’s] resistance” (Lorde 119) to oppression. “The Black experience” meant the black man’s experience as black 3 women’s concerns were overshadowed by the black masculinist dogma of Black Nationalism and its outgrowth, the Black Arts Movement, as black women’s construct of blackness was more inclusive. Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Afeni Shakur, and Angela Davis, as Black Panthers, were effective political agents; they were outspoken activists at rallies, organizing protests, and promoting the tenets of Black Power as officers in the group.5 Though the Movement’s pervasive sexism still restricted the change these women could affect, as “the Black Panther
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