'Mama's Gun': Transgressive Narratives of Race, Gender and Nation

‘MAMA’S GUN’: TRANSGRESSIVE NARRATIVES OF RACE, GENDER AND NATION IN POST CIVIL RIGHTS BLACK LITERATURE AND CULTURE By MARLO D. DAVID A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2009 1 © 2009 Marlo D. David 2 To my sons, Akintunde and Ade 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my director, Debra Walker King, for her mentorship and support. I would also like to thank my readers, L. H. Stallings, Tace Hedrick, Kevin Everod Quashie, and Stephanie Y. Evans for their intellectual encouragement. I would also like to express my gratitude to my close friends and graduate school colleagues who offered immeasurable assistance. Finally, I wish to express my love to my family, because without them I would have never completed this daunting project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................... 4 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 MAMA’S GUN: ‘DEFIANCE THAT HEALS’ ......................................................................... 9 Methods and Terminology .......................................................................................................... 16 “Angles of Seeing:” Perspectives on Motherhood .................................................................... 30 Mama’s Gun: A Trope ................................................................................................................ 39 Chapter Summaries ..................................................................................................................... 43 Notes ............................................................................................................................................ 46 2 'I GOT SELF, PENCIL, AND NOTEBOOK:' LITERACY AND MOTHERHOOD IN ALICE WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE AND SAPPHIRE’S PUSH ............................. 49 'Alienated and Fragmented Maternities': Black Women’s Contemporary Reproductive Politics ...................................................................................................................................... 55 'Heroic Maternal Self-Transformation' in Alice Walker's The Color Purple .......................... 60 Celie Emerges as a Writer ................................................................................................... 64 “Writing” Her Baby’s Name ............................................................................................... 67 “Push, Preshecita Push”: Mapping Motherhood as Transgressive Subjectivity in Sapphire’s Post-Civil Rights Dystopia................................................................................... 70 Quest for Literacy ................................................................................................................ 74 Writing Herself into the World ........................................................................................... 76 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 79 Notes ............................................................................................................................................ 79 3 MAMA’S GOT THE BLUES, OR SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A CHILDLESS MOTHER: THE BLUES AS MATERNAL COUNTER-NARRATIVE IN GAYL JONES’ CORREGIDORA .......................................................................................................... 81 ‘A Woman Who Knows Her Way Around:’ Black Feminist Readings of the Blues Women ..................................................................................................................................... 88 The Classic Blues Era .......................................................................................................... 90 Validating Gender Play ....................................................................................................... 93 The Blues Mama as the Childless Mother: Rejection , Disruption and Displacement of Nationalist Conceptions of Family ......................................................................................... 95 Motherhood as ‘Umbilicus between Language and Creation’ ............................................... 101 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 104 Notes .......................................................................................................................................... 105 5 4 COLONIZED WOMBS, CYBORG IDENTITIES AND REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY: MATERNAL DIALECTICS OF LILITH IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S DAWN ........................................................................................................................................ 107 The Promise and Illusion of Reproductive Equality ............................................................... 114 Enslavement as Alien Abduction Narrative ..................................................................... 122 Reproduction within the Neo-slave Narrative Tradition ................................................. 126 New Gender Paradigm ...................................................................................................... 130 Cyborg Possibility ..................................................................................................................... 132 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 134 Notes .......................................................................................................................................... 134 5 BIG MAMA, MADEA, AND SUPERMODEL: QUEER PERFORMANCE OF THE BLACK MATERNAL FIGURE IN THE WORK OF TYLER PERRY AND RUPAUL .. 137 Transgressive Possibility in Queer Performances of the Black Mother ................................ 140 ‘Magnificently Physical:’ Big Mama, Performance, and the Reproduction of Black Mother .................................................................................................................................... 144 “Agency is Such a Drag for Those in Power! If You Don’t Believe Me, Ask Your Mama!” .................................................................................................................................. 152 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 159 Notes .......................................................................................................................................... 160 6 I KNOW YOU NOT TALKIN’ ‘BOUT MY MAMA: FINAL THOUGHTS ON MAMA’S GUN AND THE POSSIBILITY OF TRANSGRESSION .................................. 162 LIST OF REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 172 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................... 180 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ‘MAMA’S GUN’: TRANSGRESSIVE NARRATIVES OF RACE, GENDER AND NATION IN POST CIVIL RIGHTS BLACK LITERATURE AND CULTURE By Marlo D. David May 2009 Chair: Debra Walker King Major: English The figure of “mother” is a powerful and recurrent symbol in African-American literature and culture, particularly as a signifier of origins, tradition, family cohesion, strength and survival. Within the broader context of contemporary trans-racial political and social relations in the United States, however, the figurative “black mother” often signifies excess, pathology, victimization and monstrosity within hegemonic discourses of the family and the nation. While dominant groups have manipulated the latter symbolic economy as an ideological tool to enforce regressive and exclusionary practices along the lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality, African-American writers and artists continue to centralize black mothers and their critical concerns with issues of citizenship, decolonization, human and civil rights, social justice, and various nationalisms. With this framework in mind, my dissertation describes a transgressive maternal politics appearing in contemporary literature and culture that prioritizes black women as agents of transformative critiques of racial and gender hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that as the promise of legislative and social reforms made during the Civil Rights era shifted in the late 20th century, many narratives of “mother” in post-Civil Rights African-American literature and culture shifted toward mother figures who act as subjects through their disruption of gender categories and major claims to the American Dream. Through 7 themes of sexuality, desire, fertility and militancy, these mother figures offer alternative lenses through which to consider contemporary depictions of racialized mothers. Recent representations of these black mother figures respond to hegemonic ideologies regarding race, class, gender and sexuality that have historically relied upon images of the “good mother.” Of course, these representations

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