DOCSLIB.ORG

"There's a Way to Alter the Pain". Biblical Revision and African

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
11 1. Introduction The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert […] "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?" "I'm running away from my mistress Sarai," she answered. Then the angel of the LORD told her, "Go back to your mistress and submit to her." The angel added, "I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count." […] She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: "You are the God who sees me," for she said, "I have now seen the One who sees me.1 Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me […] Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’s take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway though de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here was you in de world. So whilst Ah was tendin’ you of nights Ah said Ah’d save de text for you.2 A few years short of the turn of the 19th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an out- spoken leading figure in the early women’s rights movement, refused to attend a suffragists prayer meeting that was to begin with the singing of the hymn Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah. Her reasons for not attending, recounts Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza in In Memory Of Her, was her conviction that the Biblical Jehovah had “never taken any active part in the suffrage movement”3 and that ecclesiastical teachings made Christian women falsely believe that any man had “ever [seen] or talked with God.”4 Her experience of the seeming indifference of a patriarchal Yahweh figure preached in church towards the rights of the op- pressed sparked her deep personal conviction that the Bible itself carried great political influence. In the ensuing project which became known as The Woman’s Bible which was to gather and re-interpret all statements referring to women in the Bible, she outlined her critical insight into a radical feminist theology: “(1) The Bible is not a ‘neutral’ book, but a political weapon against women’s strug- gle for liberation. (2) This is so because the Bible bears the imprint of men who 1 Genesis 16:7-13 New International Version (NIV). If not otherwise stated, Biblical cita tions in this work are based on the New International Version (NIV) of the Christian Bible. 2 Zora Neale Hurston,Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) 15-6. 3 Barbara Welter, “Something Remains to Dare: Introduction to the Women’s Bible,” The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible: The Woman’s Bible. Ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al. (New York: Arno 1974) xxii. 4 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: a Feminist Theological Reconstructi- on of Christian Origins. (New York: Crossroad, 1983) 12. 12 never saw or talked with God.”5 She met the accusations of clergymen that this book was the “work of women and the devil,” with biting wit: This is a grave mistake. His Satanic Majesty was not to join the Revising Committee which [sic] consists of women alone. Moreover, he has been so busy of late years attend- ing Synods, General Assemblies and Conferences, to prevent the recognition of women delegates, that he has no time to study the languages and “higher criticism.”6 Indeed, the struggle for an insight into the relationship between Biblical- historical interpretation and feminist reconstruction of women’s image has been, and still is, somewhat of an “intellectual and emotional minefield”7 that has also been explored by literary writers. The example of the Egyptian slave girl Hagar illustrates this. The Biblical portrayal of Hagar as a powerless and feeble subject to her owners, Abraham and Sarah, and mere bodily vessel to her son Ishmael, has, through the centuries, become a complex and powerful point for negotiating female emotional and physical resilience in the face of oppressive, patriarchic structures and practices. Mistreated and abused by her owners, Hagar flees into the desert where she encounters God, the one who truly sees her. This image has, throughout the 19th century, been appropriated mostly by white women writers (E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Marion Stephens and others) telling the story of a Black woman who, involved in sexual relations outside of marriage, defies patriarchal tyranny and embarks on a quest of self-expression. Among the first African American female writers to reclaim the Hagar myth was Pauline Hopkins who in the serially published novel Hagar’s Daughter (1901/1902) at- tempts a critical response to the systematic undermining of black female identity and actively resists the sexualization of Black women. Iconic Black women writers of the 20th century, among them Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison pick up the thread of Hagar’s narrative by challenging in their writing the stigmatization of Black women’s sexuality in a white patriarchal society. After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the narrative sur- rounding the slave girl Hagar started to open up the forgotten door to a hitherto male-dominated theosophical discussion, pointing the way to a newly re-covered understanding of women with regards to themselves, divinity and creation.8 Dur- 5 Schüssler Fiorenza 7. 6 Welter 2.7. 7 Schüssler Fiorenza 3. 8 Prior to that, throughout the 19th century, it was mostly white women writers (E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Marion Stephens and others) appropriating the Hagar myth which they portrayed as a story of a black woman exhibiting sexuality outside marriage, defying patriarchal tyranny and embarking on a quest of self-expression. However, these white women novelists more or less eliminated Hagar’s blackness 13 ing her studies in the 1970s at the New York Union Theological Seminary, the now renowned scholar and theologian Delores S. Williams learned of the star- tling absence of black women’s experiences from Christian theology and began to construct a worldview from the perspective of African-American women.9 It was in this inconspicuous slave girl Hagar that Williams discovered a vantage point for this “second tradition of African-American biblical [sic] appropria- tion”10 that allowed for the significance of the Black woman’s experience within the Bible but also in real life as the analogies between Hagar and Black women in the US delivered historically identical testimonies of sexual slavery and loss of identity. The novelist Gloria Naylor, herself deeply influenced by her upbringing in the restorationist Christian sect of the Jehova’s Witnesses that promotes the idea of the imminent establishment of a divine kingdom on earth, emulates Williams’ considerations in her fictional writing and keenly incorporates her matricentral concept within the cultural paradigm of Africana Womanism. In this book, I will show that the contemporary African-American novelist Glo- ria Naylor not only partakes in this tradition of Biblical appropriation, but also develops it further in her fiction: I argue that through the literary appropriation of Biblical master narratives and Judeo-Christian imagery, and through the in- corporation of Africana Womanist elements as a subtext, Naylor provides an from her character in order to make it an “acceptable” character for the white readers- hip. In Hagar the Egyptian, Savina Teubal points out that Hagar’s story is in fact not only indicative of a slave-owner relationship but also about the relationship of women among each other.The fact that surrogate motherhood (Hagar acted as surrogate mother for the barren Sarah) was commonplace leads Teubal to the conclusion that Hagar’s and Sarah’s troubled relationship is indeed indicative of misperceptions and prejudices of one woman towards another (Savina J. Teubal, Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition of the Matriarchs (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990). 9 Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) 1-2. Her goal was to “shape a theology that is at once committed to black women’s issues and life -struggled and simultaneously addresses the black community’s historic struggle to survive and develop a positive, productive quality of life in the face of death […] [to] design theological language and devise theological methods that not only speak in the academy but also speak to African-American women and the African-American co mmunity in a language they can understand.” In the course of her research, she disc overed that “For over a hundred years, the community had appropriated the Bible in such a way that black women’s experience figured just as eminently as black men’s in the community’s memory, in its self-understanding and in its understanding of God’s relation to its life” (xii). 10 Williams, Sisters 2. 14 alternative view on the Christian discourse on suffering and arrives at a liberat- ing, matricentric theosophy that is juxtaposed to the traditional, patriarchal, fic- tional world. This is a two-tiered endeavor: on the one hand, Naylor offers her African American characters, through the revision and appropriation of identity- creating cultural master narratives, the possibility to redeem themselves from century-old sexist, racist and classist stigmatization. On the other hand, she transforms, through the recovery and integration of the female perspective within these narratives, the textual fragments of female archetypes into complete and autonomous existences through which the female creative principle survives side by side with the male. In a close-reading analysis of the literary pillars of Naylor’s fictional New World Order, i.e.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Izabella Penier Culture-Bearing Women
    Izabella Penier Culture-bearing Women: The Black Women Renaissance and Cultural Nationalism This monograph was written during Marie Curie-Sklodowska Fellowship 2016-2018 (European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant agreement No 706741) Izabella Penier Culture-bearing Women The Black Women Renaissance and Cultural Nationalism Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Language Editor: Adam Leverton ISBN 978-83-956095-4-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-83-956095-5-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-83-956095-6-5 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go 4o http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. © 2019 Izabella Penier Published by De Gruyter Poland Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Language Editor: Adam Leverton www.degruyter.com Cover illustration: https://unsplash.com/@jeka_fe by Jessica Felicio Contents Preface 1 1 Introduction: The Black Women Renaissance, Matrilineal Romances and the “Volkish Tradition” 16 1.1 African Americans as an “Imagined” Community and the Roots of the “Volkish” Tradition 32 1.2 Two Versions of the National “Family Plot”: Black National Theatre and the Historical /Heritage Writing of the Black Women’s Renaissance 40 1.3 The Black Women’s Renaissance and Black Cultural Nationalism: Can Nationalism and Feminism Merge?
    [Show full text]
  • American Book Awards 2004
    BEFORE COLUMBUS FOUNDATION PRESENTS THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS 2004 America was intended to be a place where freedom from discrimination was the means by which equality was achieved. Today, American culture THE is the most diverse ever on the face of this earth. Recognizing literary excel- lence demands a panoramic perspective. A narrow view strictly to the mainstream ignores all the tributaries that feed it. American literature is AMERICAN not one tradition but all traditions. From those who have been here for thousands of years to the most recent immigrants, we are all contributing to American culture. We are all being translated into a new language. BOOK Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not “discover” America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do AWARDS so. The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. BCF has always employed the term “multicultural” not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as a definition of all American litera- ture. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture—the whole comprises the parts. In 1978, the Board of Directors of BCF (authors, editors, and publishers representing the multicultural diversity of American Literature) decided that one of its programs should be a book award that would, for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restric- tion or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre.
    [Show full text]
  • Interview with Gloria Naylor
    Rn·i.1tu de Estudios Norteamerirnuos. 11." I ( 1991 ), pp. 23-35 INTERVIEW WITH GLORIA NAYLOR ANGELS CARABÍ Universidad de Barcelona ANGELS CARABI: I understand that your parents migrated from Robinson, Mississippi. GLORIA NA YLOR: That's right. A.C.: And that your mother was in a state of advanced pregnancy when she moved to the north. G.N.: Yes. my mother was eight months pregnant when she moved with my father from Robinson, Miss. to New York City. She decided to travel before I was born because she was adamant that none of her children would be born in the South. You see, we 're talking now about the late l 940s. My parents were both raised in the South in the l 930's and they were poor people. they were farmers, share-croppers. This meant that you farmed somebody else's land and you gave 40% of the crops that you cultivated. My mother loved toread but she could not afford to buy books because at that time, books were a luxury for anyone. So the only access to rcading were the public libraries whose entrancc. due to the política! and social situation in Mississippi, was forbidden to black people. To be able to buy books, my mother had to work extra hours. On Saturdays, which were her free days, she would go in somebody else's field and do day labor for which she would get 50 c. At thc end of the month she would have about $2.00 that she would send to book clubs.
    [Show full text]
  • Longing and Belonging 1. See Simone De Beauvoir, the Second Sex, Trans
    Notes Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 1. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1953; rpt., New York:Knopf, 1971); and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mys- tique (1963; rpt., New York:Dell, 1964). 2. A number of novels by women published during the late 1960s and the 1970s mirrored those views, representing the perspective of the trapped woman or “mad housewife” who felt compelled to leave home to escape from the tyranny of domesticity and to find herself. Representative novels include Sue Kaufman, The Diary of a Mad Housewife (New York: Random House, 1967); Anne Richardson Roiphe, Up the Sandbox (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1970); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); and Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (New York: Summit, 1977). 3. Susan Stanford Friedman uses the phrase “locational feminism” to suggest an expanded feminist discourse based upon “the assumption of changing historical and geographical specificities that produce different feminist the- ories, agendas, and political practices. Locational feminism requires a geopolitical literacy that acknowledges the interlocking dimension of global cultures, the way in which the local is always informed by the global and the global by the local.” Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5. 4. The exiled Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah joins the political and meta- physical meanings of exile in his answer to his own question,“What is the topic of literature? It began with the expulsion of Adam from Paradise. What, in fact, writers do is to play around either with the myth of creation or with the myth of return.
    [Show full text]
  • The Women of Brewster Place Syllabus June 2020 © 2019 BHK LLC
    The Women of Brewster Place Syllabus June 2020 © 2019 BHK LLC. All Rights Reserved. #SmartBrownGirl is a Registered Trademark of BHK LLC. For the Black girls in the forgotten spaces. Bringing together an international community of women of color through reading and dialogue. All SmartBrownGirl® Book Club syllabi and reading guides are curated by a cohort of graduate level #SmartBrownGirl researchers. Your membership and participation in the #SmartBrownGirl Book Club ensures that we can pay all Black women who help run this book club an equitable rate. Smartbrowngirl.com The Women of Brewster Place Syllabus Author: Bry Reed Editor: Jouelzy Facebook | Instagram Table of Contents 06 Author History 07 Book History 08 Reading Tips 09 Overview & Motifs 10 The Discussion 16 Final Thoughts 19 Further Reading/Resources Author History Gloria Naylor, born on January 25th 1950, was the daughter of Southern sharecroppers who migrated to New York during The Great Migration. As a young girl, Naylor’s mother encouraged her to read and keep a journal. Her love for journaling developed into an affinity for creative writing and Naylor began to explore poetry and short stories. Following her passion for writing, she attended Brooklyn College where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English in 1981. While studying English, she specialized in Black Women’s Literature. She cites Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison as a few of her core influences. Her debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place was published in 1982. The following year, she earned her Master’s degree in African American Studies from Yale University.
    [Show full text]
  • Talk About Literature in Kansas Book Discussions
    TALK – TALK ABOUT LITERATURE IN KANSAS BOOK DISCUSSIONS To schedule a book series for your local library, senior center, historical society, or other Kansas nonprofit community organization, visit www.humanitieskansas.org. Questions? Abigail Kaup, [email protected], 785-357-0359. The 1930s Civil Rights Revisited (NEW) All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren March by John Lewis The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West Book 1 • Book 2 • Book 3 Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Citizen: An The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan American Lyric by Claudia Rankine The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Ad Astra: Working Hard in the Heartland Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander Heartland: a Memoir of Working Hard and being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh The Civil War A Diary from Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut African Experiences of Migration March by Geraldine Brooks Open City: A Novel by Teju Cole The March by E.L. Doctorow Brooklyn Heights by Miral al-Tahawy The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu Coming of Age in Rural America A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder by Ishmael Beah Good Land by Bruce Bair What Is the What by Dave Eggers Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes Winter After the Fact (NEW) Wheat by Mildred Walker The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian Station Eleven by Emily St.
    [Show full text]
  • Gloria Naylor: a Selected Bibliography Author(S): Tracy Butts Source: Callaloo , Autumn, 2000, Vol
    Gloria Naylor: A Selected Bibliography Author(s): Tracy Butts Source: Callaloo , Autumn, 2000, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 1497-1512 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3300094 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Callaloo This content downloaded from 64.121.99.5 on Mon, 22 Jun 2020 17:52:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms GLORIA NAYLOR A Selected Bibliography by Tracy Butts Primary Works (A Chronological Listing) Novels The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories. New York: Viking, 1982. Paperback reprint, New York: Penguin, 1983. Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985. Paperback reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986. Mama Day. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. Paperback reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989. Bailey's Cafe. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanich, 1992. Paperback reprint, New York: Vintage/Random House, 1993. The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion, 1998. Articles, Essays, & Notes "A Life on Beekman Place." Essence 9 (March 1979): 84-96. "When Mama Comes to Call." Essence 13 (August 1982): 78-81.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mammy, the Breeder and the Race Woman: Storytelling As Subversion in Selected Novels by Contemporary Black Women Writers
    THE MAMMY, THE BREEDER AND THE RACE WOMAN: STORYTELLING AS SUBVERSION IN SELECTED NOVELS BY CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN WRITERS By OlaOmi M. Amoloku A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2019 Thesis Committee: Dr. Laura Dubek, Thesis Director Dr. Elyce Helford, Reader DEDICATION To LaLeta, Nannie M., and Westel For My Voice and The Will to Speak ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sincerest appreciation to my director Dr. Laura Dubek for taking this journey with me and gifting me with the mantra “She persisted.” iii ABSTRACT Audre Lorde categorized her semi-autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name , published in 1982, as biomythography. In doing so, Lorde suggested a new genre of writing that challenges the boundaries of existing genres, particularly for Black women writers. Lorde’s unique method of storytelling utilizes elements of traditional biography as well as the history of myth, this combination constituting a “new spelling” of her name. Since 1982, the term biomythography has become a sort of umbrella for many types of feminist (auto)biographical writing. With close readings of three novels by contemporary black women writers—Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day , Octavia Butler’s Dawn , and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix —I argue that work currently considered in the genre of Afrofuturism should instead be read as biomythography. Naylor, Butler, and Okorafor all do the work of biomythography by foregrounding, in fiction, the rich inner lives of Black women in a way that directly challenges two dominant myths of Black womanhood—the mammy and the breeder—and, in Okorafor’s case, reclaims and rewrites the narrative of the Race Woman.
    [Show full text]
  • Redalyc.RETHINKING MOTHERHOOD and MOTHERLY LOVE in TONI MORRISON's SULA and GLORIA NAYLOR's the WOMEN of BREWSTER PLACE
    Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies E-ISSN: 2175-8026 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Brasil Ribeiro, Ane Caroline; de Paiva dos Santos, José RETHINKING MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERLY LOVE IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND GLORIA NAYLOR’S THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, vol. 70, núm. 1, enero-abril, 2017, pp. 69-79 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=478355266007 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p69 RETHINKING MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERLY LOVE IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND GLORIA NAYLOR’S THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE Ane Caroline Ribeiro* Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, MG, BR José de Paiva dos Santos** Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, MG, BR Abstract his article examines how the novels Sula, by Toni Morrison, and he Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor, deconstruct long-held controlling images of black women, particularly the matriarch. he characters Eva Peace in Sula and Mattie Michael in he Women of Brewster Place, among others, provide great illustrations of black women who have rejected many of the places and stereotypes reserved for them in society, consequently deconstructing controlling images white society has imposed on them.
    [Show full text]
  • Literariness and Racial Consciousness in Paule Marshall's Memoir Triangular Road and Gloria Naylor's Fictionalized Memoir 1996
    Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 50/2-3, 2015 doi: 10.1515/stap-2015-0023 LITERARINESS AND RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN PAULE MARSHALL’S MEMOIR TRIANGULAR ROAD AND GLORIA NAYLOR’S FICTIONALIZED MEMOIR 1996 AGNIESZKA ŁOBODZIEC University of Zielona Góra ABSTRACT Black American women writers were side-lined by the literary canon as recently as the 1980s. To- day, as a result of their agency, a distinct literary tradition that bears witness to black women’s particular expressiveness is recognized. Bernard Bell observes that the defining features common to most literary works by black American women are a focus on racist oppression, black female protagonists, the pursuit of demarginalization, women’s bonding, women’s relationship with the community, the power of emotions, and black female language. Although these elements refer pre- dominantly to novels, they are also present in Paule Marshall’s memoir Triangular Road (2009) and Gloria Naylor’s fictionalized memoir 1996 (2005). Moreover, the two works are fitting exam- ples of racial art, the point of departure of which, according to Black Arts Movement advocates, should be the black experience. Actually, since through memoirs the authors offer significant in- sights into themselves, the genre seems closer to this objective of racial art than novels. At the same time, taking into consideration the intricate plot structures, vivid images, and emotional intensity, their memoirs evidence the quality of literariness i.e., in formalist terms, the set of features that distinguish texts from non-literary ones, for instance, reports, articles, text books, and encyclopae- dic biographical entries. Moreover, Marshall and Naylor utilize creative imagination incorporating fabulation, stories within stories, and people or events they have never personally encountered, which dramatizes and intensifies the experiences they relate.
    [Show full text]
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara; the Literary
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2019 Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara; The Literary Representation of Foucault’s Genealogy Between Black Women Authors and Their Black Women Protagonists Cindelle Harris CUNY City College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/745 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara; The Literary Representation of Foucault’s Genealogy Between Black Women Authors and Their Black Women Protagonists Cindelle D. Harris May 7, 2019 Dr. Gordon Thompson [email protected] Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts of The City College of The City University of New York. “But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women-- our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves-- have not perished in the wilderness. And if we ask ​ ​ ourselves why, and search and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we black American women are.” - Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction: A Conversation Between Black Women Storytelling and Foucault’s Genealogy 3 Unburied and Disqualified Knowledges; Foucault’s Genealogy As Critical Approach 5 Zora Neale Hurston’s Literary Genealogy; The Unburied Knowledge.
    [Show full text]
  • The Politics of Mental Health and Long-Suffering in Toni Cade Bambara
    religions Article “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That You Want to Be Well?”: The Politics of Mental Health and Long-Suffering in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters Belinda Waller-Peterson English Department, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA 18018, USA; [email protected] Received: 14 February 2019; Accepted: 9 April 2019; Published: 12 April 2019 Abstract: In analyzing the woman-centered communal healing ceremony in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, this article considers how these types of womb-like spaces allow female protagonists to access ancestral and spiritual histories that assist them in navigating physical illnesses and mental health crises. It employs Bell Hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery alongside Arthur Kleinman’s definition of illness as social and transactional to demonstrate that the recognition of illness, and the actualization of wellness, necessitates collective and communal efforts informed by spiritual and cultural modes of knowledge, including alternative healing practices and ancestral mediation. Keywords: health; healing; ancestral mediation; illness; activism; women’s rights Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980) opens with a seemingly simple question posed by Minnie Ransom, a healer: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Minnie returns to this question in various iterations throughout the novel in order to assist the troubled protagonist in finding her own definition of wellness within her turbulent life. The Salt Eaters centralizes the problem of illness and the actualization of wellness within a setting that necessitates the presence of medical caregivers, healers, the ill person, and members of their community. In doing so, Bambara creates a symbiotic model that thrives on the dynamic interface between these groups.
    [Show full text]