scholarly journals Description of Subjugated Woman in ZoraNaele Hurston’s “Their Eyes were Watching God”: A Feminist Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-138
Author(s):  
Qasim Javed Ghauri ◽  
Muhammad Ehsan ◽  
Quratul Ain Shafique ◽  
Muhammad Zohaib Khalil ◽  
Atta-ul Mustafa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Women's Identity ◽  
Dominant Society

This study aims to explore the subjugated woman in male dominant society in ZoraNaele Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American Literature. One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of ZoraNeale Hurston. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. This study spotlights how women live under social restrained destiny; where they suffer letdown, thwarting, dismay and mocking. Subjugation against women which transcends all natural, ethnic and class boundaries. Women are mistreated by patriarchy financially, politically, socially and mentally. Where there is patriarchy, the woman is the other. She's objectified and marginalized, characterized just by her distinction from “ale standard”. All women’s activist movement specifically advances social change and women’ equality. A woman is not considered an equal, but rather the other, and thus inferior to a man. All these problems and incidents are dangerous for women’s identity. The research deals with major aspects of hegemonic masculinity, and violence against women. This research will study the threats to female identity in the light of Lois Tyson’s feministic views.  

An Afterword About Self/Communal Care

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-238
Author(s):  
Ayanna Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Literature Culture

It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get a large enough set of interlocutors; many who are resistant to pedagogies/scholarship of justice simply opt not to engage with (i.e. ignore all together) African-American literature, culture, and scholarship. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been so thoroughly adopted as both the epitome of high culture and as quintessentially American (regardless of the pesky fact of his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon) that many come to his works on the page, the stage, and in the classroom with their defenses down. They are more open and available to complex social issues when they encounter them in Shakespeare’s works. My students regularly comment that they come to my classes to study Shakespeare but leave having learned so much more about our contemporary world. I know that many of you will have heard similar comments....

scholarly journals Beyond the Color Line: A Postmodernist Reading of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. p1
Author(s):  
Bi Boli Dit Lama Berté GOURE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Creative Genius

Though African American literature can be regarded by some theorists as a means of defining the racial self, a postmodernist reading of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada delves into the intrinsic value of that literature which supersedes the traditional racial connotation ascribed to it. Reed not only castigates the metanarrative of the American cultural and democratic thought through the exposure of its inconstancies and the criticism of traditional ideas on race and ethnicity, but he also gives proof of his creative genius by operating a carnivalization of the novel genre itself.

The Problematical Portrayal of Racial Discrimination in Jacqueline Woodson’s novel “The Brown Girl Dreaming”

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-874
Author(s):  
Mrs. Jeni . S ◽  
Dr. J.G. Duresh
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black People ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White People ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Hearts And Minds

African American Literature can be defined as writings by people of African decent living in the United States.  The genre began during the 18th and 19th centuries with writers such as poet phillis Wheatley and Orator Frederick Douglass reached as an early highpoint with the Harlem Renaissance and continues with the authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley, James Baldwin etc.  The themes and issues explored in African American literature are tradition, culture, racism, religion, slavery, segregation, migration, and feminism and more. This paper deals with the perspectives of clashes between black and white communities through the novel The Brown Dreaming girl by Jacqueline Woodson. It clearly explains about the Whites ill-treatment and how the blacks suffer under the hands of white people. The essential part of human kind is Identification and Freedom which has been completely wiped off from the hearts and minds of the black people.

scholarly journals From Suspended to Emergent Woman, An African American Criticism of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Simon Ntamwana
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
The Third ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
Character Types

This paper discusses the rise of the woman from a downtrodden woman to an emergent subject through an assimilated subjugated woman in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is based on the African American approach and Mary Helen Washington’s theory of black woman character types in African American literature.  It aims at identifying the woman character types in the novel and discussing the woman’s ascension from her patriarchal suspension into her emergence as an independent woman. Anchored on the hypothetical contention that the woman arises from suspension to emergence through assimilation phases, it was found out that during her gradual ascension and independence quest the woman subverts the oppressive patriarchy and its abusive masculinity and transforms it into a man equitably collaborating with her. Janie the protagonist born subservient to patriarchy like her grandmother Nannie fights to liberate herself through love and marriage. While the first marriage with Logan maintains her under patriarchal oppression, the second spousal union with Jody is a simulation of liberation that refrains her from public life and expression. Through gradual revolt against patriarchy, Janie reaches her desired woman selfhood in the third marriage with Tea Cake. Keywords: Suspended, Assimilated, Emergent, African American Literary Approach

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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