scholarly journals Conjuring Trauma with (Self)Derision: The African and African-American Epistolary Fiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ousmane Ngom
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Epistolary Fiction ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Self Acceptance ◽  
Color Purple

All the female narrators of the three stories examined here – So Long a Letter, The Color Purple, and Letters from France – suffer serious traumas attributable to their male counterparts. Thus as a healing process, letter-writing is an exercise in trust that traverses the distances between the addresser and the addressee. Blurring the lines in such a way results in an intimate narration of trauma that reads as a stream of consciousness, devoid of fear of judgment or retribution. This paper studies the literary device of derision coupled with a psycho-feminist analysis to retrace the thorny, cathartic journey of trauma victims from self-hate to self-acceptance and self-agency.

African American Queer Cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Hiv Epidemic ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Color Purple

African American queer cinema was born as a reaction to the AIDS/HIV epidemic as well as the blatant homophobia that existed within the Black community in the 1980s. It began with the pioneering works of queer directors Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs and continued during the new queer cinema movement in the 1990s, particularly including the works of lesbian queer director Cheryl Dunye. However, these works were infinitesimal compared to the queer works featuring primarily White lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) protagonists during that time. That trend continues today as evidenced by looking at the highest-grossing LGBTQ films of all times: very few included any African American characters in significant roles. However, from the 1980s to the 2020s, there have been a few Black queer films that have penetrated the mainstream market and received critical acclaim, such as The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1982), Set It Off (Gary, 1996), and Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016), which won the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture. The documentary film genre has been the most influential in exposing audiences to the experiences and voices within the African American queer communities. Since many of these films are not available for viewing at mainstream theaters, Black queer cinema is primarily accessed via various cable, video streaming, and on-demand services, like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO.

scholarly journals Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4S4) ◽  
pp. 66-67
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

scholarly journals Letter- Writing as a Means of Escape in Alice Walker's the Color Purple

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (03) ◽  
Author(s):  
Majid Masad Hamdan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Defense Mechanism ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Color Purple

Escapism might be considered a life defense mechanism without which you might be burnt out faster by the stresses of everyday life. It helps the individual and even communities gain respite or achieve self- reorganization after social, sociological or psychological tensions. Letter- writing is one of its effective implements. It helps obtain a kind of personal relationship and deals with it faithfully and portrays the inner life as it is. The present study tends to explore the theme of escape represented by letter- writing in Alice Walker's. The Color Purple. It aims to demonstrate that Walker tries her best to give the heroine and her sister a chance to address God and each other directly and truly escaping from loneliness and weakness, as well as seeking for consolation and identity. Such a means is considered the only outlet for Celie, and ultimately her sister, who suffers self and familial banishment, psychological repression and sexual suppression. Her suffering is the result of an oppressive and sexually- agitated stepfather who brutalizes, rapes and impregnates her twice at an early stage of her life.

scholarly journals A Discourse Stylistics Analysis on the Regularities in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mardliya Pratiwi Zamruddin ◽  
Burhanuddin Arafah
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
National Language ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

The purpose of this study was to describe the regularities of the American Postmodern Novelist: Alice Walker with a focus on a character’s and/or narrator’s mind style in a stylistic and narratological approach. This study aimed to attain the regularities from the American novelist’s literary work and how the regularities/irregularities occur in the novel to frame the style of the novelist in producing her literary work. This study was a descriptive qualitative by taken into account of stylistics categories and mind style which were applied to the Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The data of this study were taken from Alice Walker’s novel entitled The Color Purple. The result of the study showed the occurrences and the forms of regularities in the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker which represented the style of the novelist in creating her literary work. The bold character of African-American Vernacular English that were found in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple showed that the novelist poured their mind style in their literary works by showing their stylistic options in producing the novel. By showing their writing style the novelists were contributed to the development of national language in America.

Reversal of Stereotypes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple: God, Gender, Narrative and Sexuality

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Morshedul Arifin ◽  
◽  
Shah Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
American Authors

Unlike most African-American authors, who constantly mirror the repressive effects of racism, classicism and gender discrimination, Alice Walker (1944–) in her The Color Purple (1982) compulsively deals with sexism that was still pervasive within African American communities during the early twentieth century. She argues that just as black groups are relegated to an underclass due to the colour of their skin in a wider milieu of white society, in the same way the black women are reduced to a more inferior class due to their sex in their own community. For women’s self-emancipation from such an inhibitory patriarchy, the novel gives an overarching emphasis on the formation of language, execution of voice, review of sexual preference and redefinition of identity of her female characters, the protagonist Celie in particular. This paper examines how, by a fusion of the bildungsroman and epistolary conventions, the novelist melds a unique way for her women creating a God for their own and carving out a niche in social and economic concerns. It assesses the strategic reversal of gender stereotype as well as sexual orientation in order to establish the independence and equality of women on a par with men. The paper ends up with the claim that the novel is predicated upon the theoretical prism of womanism, previously premised by Walker herself, which puts extensive emphasis on a deeper, empathetic relationship and camaraderie of women.

Toward the Survival and Wholeness of the African American Community: A Womanist Reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 388-400
Author(s):  
Terrence Musanga ◽  
Theophilus Mukhuba
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
American People ◽  
African American Community ◽  
African American People ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Black Poor ◽  
Color Purple

This article attempts a womanist reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker provides a gendered perspective of what it means to be “black,” “ugly,” “poor,” and a “woman” in America. This perspective is ignored in the majority of male-authored African American texts that privilege race and class issues. Being “black,” “poor,” “ugly,” and a “woman,” underscores the complexity of the African American woman’s experience as it condemns African American women into invisibility. However, Walker’s characters like Celie, Sofia, Shug, Mary Agnes, and Nettie fight for visibility and assist each other as African American women in their quest for freedom and independence in a capitalist, patriarchal, and racially polarized America. This article therefore maps out Celie’s evolution from being a submissive and uneducated “nobody” (invisible/voiceless) to a mature and independent “someone” (visibility/having a voice). Two important womanist concepts namely “family” and “sisterhood” inform this metamorphosis as Walker underscores her commitment to the survival and wholeness of African American people.

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