African American women and feminism: Alice Walker's womanism ...

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10 Marta Mazurek ary production mastery of the Bible and the poetry of Milton, Pope and Gray was contrary to the eighteenth-century conviction that Black slaves were naturally unable to create literature, which proved their sub-human position in the chain of beings and justified the institution of slavery in America. Two hundred and twenty years after the first African American woman proved her humanity by writing poetry, the first African American woman Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature for the outstanding value of her creative writing. Morrison’s novels are not art for art’s sake, as she claims, but they are tightly linked to the culture and history of her community. “I write [...] village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe”, she asserts, adding that her novels “should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment” . In order to write literature deeply rooted in the African American culture of her community, she incorporates the major characteristics of Black art, that is oral quality, a choral note, myth, music, folklore and, most importantly, the trope of the ancestor and memory . As many other African American women writers, Morrison asserts that she situates herself within the African American community and its tradition of resisting discrediting views of the dominant society rather that aligns herself with the Black feminist model of critical inquiry, “because any model of criticism that excludes males from it is as hampered as any model of criticism of Black literature that excludes women from it” . Morrison’s assertion implies that for an African American woman writer it is more important to create for the nourishment of the African American community including both men and women than separate herself from it by assuming a Black feminist stance. Discernible in the essay Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation is her choice to remain loyal to the politics of Black nationalism/ethnicity and the rejection of Black feminism as separating African American women from men. Moreover, Afrocentric values that permeate the African American family, community, religion and culture point to a value system that existed before and independently of the system of racial domination, and reliance on Afrocentric tradition, that is precisely on what differentiates the African American community from other communities, seems to be particularly empowering for Morrison, as it is for her characters. African American women’s anxiety caused by their necessity to choose loyalties, as Morrison did in her essay, stems from an apparent conflict between feminist critical framework and African American unity. On the basis of a selection of T. LeClair: The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison. “New Republic” 1981, 184, p. 26. T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation. In: What Moves at the Margin. Ed. C. C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008, p. 61. T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, op.cit., p. 64.
African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 11 African American women’s critical essays this paper demonstrates how Alice Walker’s proposition of the womanist critical (and practical) perspective might serve the politics of reconciliation rather than radical separation from feminism without the necessity to give up commitment to uphold the unity of the African American community. The presented improvisational analysis of Alice Walker’s essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens aims to demonstrate womanism’s potential of employing the politics of a friendly dialogue with feminism to both support feminist politics and assert its uniqueness by stressing womanism’s rootedness in African American tradition and culture. Locating African American women’s standpoint Responding to the dominant and universalizing academic discourse of poststructuralist theory in the 1980s, Black feminist critic Barbara Christian articulated her disappointment with – and the feeling of being “intimidated, devalued” by – the intellectual hegemony of Euro-American abstract logic that surrounded the definition of knowledge in the academia . As a woman of color she felt excluded by what she called “the race for theory”, which she saw as the “takeover” of white philosophers who had “reinvented the meaning of theory”, seeing that the world was “fast escaping their political control” . According to her, the popularization of Western abstract theory as constitutive for the definition of knowledge in the academia was alien to emerging literatures created by people who struggled to be heard, that is people of color, feminists, radical critics and creative writers. Christian felt particularly discouraged by the incomprehensibility of the language of theory, its prescriptiveness and the tendency to relegate to a marginal position of “minority discourse” those African American writers for whom “literature is not an occasion for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishment of their people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better” . In her critique of “the race for theory”, Christian also indicates that in their effort to follow the injunction to theorize – and thus legitimize their place in the academia – feminists exclude women of color who have always theorized, but their notion of theory does not necessarily converge with what is considered academic theory. Consequently, her statement: “my folk [...] have always been a race for theory” may be interpreted, on the one hand, as pointing to mar- B. Christian: The Race for Theory. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W. Napier. New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, p. 280. B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 280. B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 282. Ibid.
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