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Issues of racism in the color purple by Alice Walker
Alice Walker on racism
Issues of racism in the color purple by Alice Walker
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Victor Sejour’s short story “The Mulatto” from 1837 and Alice Walker’s story “The Child Who Favoured Daughter” from her collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women in 1973 are fine examples of African American gothic representing the complexity of racism within society and the theme of female sexuality. The stories have several themes in common that they address in their distinct manner. For instance, the representation of the slave community surrounding the main characters in “The Mulatto” is cooperated whereas, in “The Child Who Favoured Daughter,” the protagonist appears to have chosen to stay aloof from the society he belongs to. Another difference is in their respective narrative strategies; “The Mulatto” allegorizes the plot, lacking the gruesome narrative details of slave treatment, which lies in contrast with Walker’s story that offers an intensively detailed account. Further, “The Mulatto” deals with the macro issue of subjugation of mixed race slaves while “The Child Who Favoured Daughter” explicates the internal struggle of Africans in a free land. This racial struggle and their respective histories of violence result into the protagonists’ present state of ultimate madness making the two stories a gothic tragedy. Though the two stories belong to African American gothic genre, a common ground of representation is the similarity between the two texts of the mal-treatment of women, resulting from male desire that leads to their tragic demise. The dismal conditions that cripple women and issues surrounding it, like incestuous desires support the plot of the stories illustrating often-reversed assumptions of slavery. Exploring the ineffectual kinships and the US taboo of interracial sexual relationships, these st...
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...nying altogether the possibility of proving their masters wrong.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Séjour, Victor. "The Mulatto." Translated by Philip Barnard. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay.
See more at: http://southernspaces.org/2007/seeds-rebellion-plantation-fiction victor s%C3%A9jours-mulatto#sthash.zlNBWLx9.dpuf
Walker, Alice. “The Child Who Favoured Daughter.” In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women.
Daut, Marlene. “"Sons of White Fathers": Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's"The Mulatto"” Nineteenth-Century Literature.
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Petry, Alice Hall. ”Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction.” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 12-27 .
Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 163-67. Print.
Laurence Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes, uses first-person narrator to depict the whole life ofAminata Diallo, beginning with Bayo, a small village in West Africa, abducting from her family at eleven years old. She witnessed the death of her parents with her own eyes when she was stolen. She was then sent to America and began her slave life. She went through a lot: she lost her children and was informed that her husband was dead. At last she gained freedom again and became an abolitionist against the slave trade. This book uses slave narrative as its genre to present a powerful woman’s life.She was a slave, yes, but she was also an abolitionist. She always held hope in the heart, she resist her dehumanization.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
The purpose of this essay is to highlight the issues that Dana, a young African-American writer, witness as an observer through time. As a time traveler, she witnesses slavery and gender violation during 19th and 20th centuries and examines these problems in terms of how white supremacy disrupts black familial bonds. While approaching Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, this essay analyses how gender and racial violation relates to familial bonds through Dana 's experience in Tom Weylin 's plantation. It is argued that Butler uses pathos, ethos, and in rare cases logos, to effectively convey her ideas of unfairness during the American slavery, such as examining the roots of Weylin’s cruel attitude towards black people, growing conflicts between
Rooks, Noliwe. The Women Who Said, I AM. Vol. Sage: A Scholarly Journal On Black Women 1988.
Walker, Alice. "In Search of Our Mothers? Gardens." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Norton, 1997. 2383.
In the novel, the author proposes that the African American female slave’s need to overcome three obstacles was what unavoidably separated her from the rest of society; she was black, female, and a slave, in a white male dominating society. The novel “locates black women at the intersection of racial and sexual ideologies and politics (12).” White begins by illustrating the Europeans’ two major stereotypes o...
Beale, Frances. "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female." An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New, 1995. 146. Print.
In this essay I intend to delve into the representation of family in the slave narrative, focusing on Frederick Douglas’ ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’ and Harriet Jacobs ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’ Slave narratives are biographical and autobiographical stories of freedom either written or told by former slaves. The majority of them were ‘told to’ accounts written with the aid of abolitionist editors between 1830 and 1865. An amount of narratives were written entirely by the author and are referred to as authentic autobiographies. The first of more than six thousand extant slave narratives were published in 1703. Primarily written as propaganda, the narratives served as important weapons in the warfare against slavery. Slave narratives can be considered as a literary genre for a number of reasons. They are united by the common purpose of pointing out the evils of slavery and attacking the notion of black inferiority. In the narratives, you can find simple and often dramatic accounts of personal experience, strong revelation of the char...
Walker and Marshall write about an identity that they have found with African-American women of the past. They both refer to great writers such as Zora Neale Hurston or Phillis Wheatley. But more importantly, they connect themselves to their ancestors. The see that their writings can be identified with what the unknown African-American women of the past longed to say but they did not have the freedom to do so. They both admire many literary greats such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen, but they appreciate these authors' works more than they can identify with them.
Detrimental stereotypes of minorities affect everyone today as they did during the antebellum period. Walker’s subject matter reminds people of this, as does her symbolic use of stark black and white. Her work shocks. It disgusts. The important part is: her work elicits a reaction from the viewer; it reminds them of a dark time in history and represents that time in the most fantastically nightmarish way possible. In her own words, Walker has said, “I didn’t want a completely passive viewer, I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would either giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful”. Certainly, her usage of controversial cultural signifiers serve not only to remind the viewer of the way blacks were viewed, but that they were cast in that image by people like the viewer. Thus, the viewer is implicated in the injustices within her work. In a way, the scenes she creates are a subversive display of the slim power of slave over owner, of woman over man, of viewed over
This article explores Haitian Independence in terms of a war for national liberation. The disassociation from white governance left a window of opportunity for long-term nat...
Rucker, W. C., The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are similar to having the same concept about black women to have a voice. Both are political, controversial, and talented experiencing negative and positive reviews in their own communities. These two influential African-American female authors describe the southern hospitality roots. Hurston was an influential writer in the Harlem Renaissance, who died from mysterious death in the sixties. Walker who is an activist and author in the early seventies confronts sexually progression in the south through the Great Depression period (Howard 200). Their theories point out feminism of encountering survival through fiction stories. As a result, Walker embraced the values of Hurston’s work that allowed a larger
Although none of the novels were wrote in conjunction, each has a link towards the other regarding abuse, both sexual and spousal, as well as class oppression and the manual labor that was a necessity for survival among black women. By examining present society, one can observe the systems of oppressions that have changed for the better as well as those that continue to devastate the lives of many women today.