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Alice Walker Matters: the FRUITS of GENDERED SPACE Book Title University of North Carolina Press Chapter Title: Alice Walker Matters: THE FRUITS OF GENDERED SPACE Book Title: Southscapes Book Subtitle: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature Book Author(s): Thadious M. Davis Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2011) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807869321_davis.9 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 http://about.jstor.org/terms University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Southscapes This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms chapter six Alice Walker Matters THE FRUITS OF GENDERED SPACE i. reconstruction of southern racial space How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? . It is not only the codes — the map’s legend, the conventional signs of map- making and map- reading — that are liable to change, but also the objects represented, the lens through which they are viewed, and the scale used. — henri lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991) Alice Walker, that famous spirited Georgia native, certainly does not need a rehabilitation of her reputation. Yet, as I have been thinking about Southern Studies and scholarly production, I began to notice that Walker has slipped out of recent discourses and that her contribution to the ways in which we today think about the South, its literary and cultural production, has been occluded in part by her own adherence to what we might call New Age, non- heteronormative political spiritualism. With that notice, I began to think about how Alice Walker, an artist forged on the battleground of Mississippi during the height of civil rights activism, may have been one primary catalyst in naturalizing how so many scholars and artists approach the South today, and with that naturalizing a concomitant erasing of her very positionality in the process. “The life of thought is a continuous story, like life itself,” Yi-Fu Tuan ob- serves in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), “one book grows out of another as in the world of political commitment one action leads to another.”1 For me, in thinking about Walker, the concept of process inter- mingled with that of the continuous story and thus the necessity of following the thought backwards to pay closer attention to how the narrative came to be what it is. As a result, here I look backward over the multiple intersecting 335 This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms public and private spaces that constitute the material and theoretical contri- butions of Alice Walker to the multidimensional and multidisciplinary work today in the new Southern Studies. Walker begins a postmodern stance toward both race and region in her deconstruction of arenas and hierarchies of power and in her transgression of the fixed and rigid notions of art, epistemologies of art, and production of art, as well as in her anticipation of the shifts in gender theory and with it cultural transformation in the very geographical matrix that was the South of her childhood and youth. When Walker brought together place and identity in her work, she destabilized both categories and began the process of the ref- ormation of both. She invented her own “radically subjective politics” within a matrix of change, but she did not produce an identity that is fragmentary, conflicted, or contradictory despite its fluid boundaries. She produced texts, critical and creative and autobiographical, that defied the notion of clearly defined and readable meaning explicit in and based upon established tran- scendental precepts. She saw pluralism and relativism, rejected nostalgia and sentimentalism, and claimed political relevance for her transformative positions and subversive ideologies, all the while insisting on her own vision, certainly idiosyncratic and subjective but not fractured or paranoid. In be- ginning to write in the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, Walker envisioned both the importance of articulating her own new southern black woman identity and the necessity of new formations and new modalities — even while asserting the changing ground for all such formations and modali- ties. In particular, she was able to foreground the damaging impact of racism and patriarchal authority/power in her short fiction, poetry, and novels, as well as in her essays, and in the process, to create a space for the gendering of subjectivity and reassessing gendered racial hierarchies. In the conjunction of her political and literary work, Walker examined gen- der and ideological formations under segregation and displayed an ability to map the postmodern at a time when among African American writers there was still a strong adherence to modernist aesthetic productions. Walker’s em- phasis on difference then becomes one of the primary ways of linking her to a postmodern aesthetic, especially by means of her collapsing the distinctions between genres and destabilizing the hierarchy of high and low culture, high and low art, and exploiting the class dynamics to challenge the hegemony of a white racialist society. In ascribing to Walker’s work a revolutionizing south- scape, I read her as personifying the political consciousness of location that bell hooks considers a “right to subjectivity” and one’s own legitimacy and “a | 336 | ALICE WALKER MATTERS This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms central location for the production of counter- hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.”2 Though William Faulkner, with his novel Absalom, Absalom!, is typically positioned currently as the southern writer used to configure a Global South, Alice Walker functions as the exemplar par excellence of the southern writer evolving over the course of an active career into a writer of the Global South in her fiction, poetry, and essays. Her late twentieth- century and early twenty- first- century writings, such as By the Light of My Father’s Smile: A Novel (1998), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003), and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (2006), with their hemispheric instantiations all move through enlarged global locations, all primarily part of the Global South, and they make their creative articula- tions not merely as a translation of uneven economic development. With each of her successive moves, Walker manifests the “global,” as Henri Lefebvre de- fined it: “[T]he capacity to conceive of and deal with space on a wide scale, even on a world scale.”3 Her writing creates a space, a southscape, from which to make futurity critically and aesthetically visible in the raced and gendered body with its origins in the past of the twentieth- century segregated South. Her work, extending from the turbulent 1960s and now resolutely into the first decades of the twenty-first century, has made a critical intervention in the ways in which the South as a region can be represented and studied and provides a concluding southscape for meditating on the spatial- racial nexus in the construction of region. Without denying the significance of Walker’s generational precursors — for instance, the popular impact of Maya Angelou’s personal writing or the methodological impact of Alex Haley’s genealogical histories — I place Walker at a crossroads, like the bluesman Robert Johnson. Her crossroads position is the rethinking of how black people in the South from her grandmothers’ and mother’s generations to her own created and survived, and how they had managed to do so with an understanding of their intersectional identities and of the potential of power resident within some few spaces — ever expanding and never collapsing. Just by way of an initial example to help engage what I am attempting here, recall for a moment Minrose Gwin’s brilliant essay “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go Down, Moses,” in which she examines Faulkner’s representation of black women, the “inscrutable face” of Tennie and the “blank spot” of the mulatta mistress’s un- told story. Gwin begins the section entitled “The Space of the Ledger” with the following: “It is this untold story that haunts Patricia Williams. Specifically, ALICE WALKER MATTERS | 337 | This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the erasure of her great- great- grandmother’s life and narrative provides the vehicle for Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights, a brilliant study of the relations of race to individual and social contractual rights in this country. Williams writes that she has tried ‘to piece together what it must have been like to be my great- great- grandmother,’ a girl purchased by a thirty-five- year old Tennessee lawyer.”4 The details of the documents that Williams uncov- ers reveal her eleven- year- old great- great- grandmother’s purchase in a bill of sale and her being listed as the thirteen- year- old mother of an eight- month- old infant in a census record two years later.
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