scholarly journals Sexuality and Healing in the African Diaspora: A Transnational Approach to Toni Morrison and Gyasi

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Mar Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Black Bodies

This article examines the literary production of two writers from the African diaspora, specifically African American Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), and Ghanaian-American Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), to explore their significance as counter-narratives that defy the “official” historiography of enslavement times in order to set the records straight, as it were. By highlighting these women writers’ project of resistance against normative definitions of black bodies, it is my contention that these works effectively mobilize notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Revisiting the harmful and denigrating legacy of stereotypical designation of enslaved women, these writers make significant political and literary interventions to facilitate the recovery, wholeness, and sanctity of the violated and abjected black body. In their attempt to counter ongoing processes of commodification, exploitation, fetishization, and sexualization, I argue that these writers chronicle new forms of identity and agency that promote individual and generational healing and care as forms of protest and resistance against toxic definitions of hegemonic gender and sexuality.

Counter-Narratives

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-184
Author(s):  
Horizan Prasanna Kumar ◽  
Meadows Bose ◽  
Alagesan M.
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Modern Era

The term ‘narrative' has attained a contemporary connotation of identity tales and has stepped outside the bounds of literature to enter into realms of sociology, anthropology, law, and even medicine. Narrative is not just the medium used by writers to tell their stories, but also a powerful tool of self-expression, with a strong reference to individual stories set in a significant cultural background. This nature of narrative has been observed in one of the most significant African American writers of the modern era – Toni Morrison. With the rise of in-betweenness and the need for a space to emerge as an individual identity, it is important for people to create narratives to counter prevalent dominant narratives.

scholarly journals Exacavating the Memory of Slavery in Léonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre (2013) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-22
Author(s):  
Abib SENE ◽  
Fatoumata Keïta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Maternal Love

Regarded as a state of servitude through which an individual or a group of persons is compelled to work their guts out without any possibility to get compensated or rewarded, slavery, for some centuries, had been implemented under various forms from one country to another. From the antiquity to the twentieth century, thralldom had been a profitable business that gangrened the African continent. Thus being, African and African American thinkers shoulder the mission to dust archives and lift the curtain of history to retell and re-narrate the episode of drudgery; among them Leonoa Miano and Toni Morrison. The purpose of this article is to examine the trauma of slavery from a comparative, matrifocal, and Afrocentric perspective so as to highlight commonalities and differences between Leonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Inspired by the infamous history of slavery, these two award-winning novels not only conjure up the ordeal of slavery, but they also catalyze its haunting memory for the sake of healing, so that both characters and readers could be cleansed off its tantalizing grip and achieve catharsis and redemption. To this end, La Saison de l’ombre and Beloved are woven around feminine counter-narratives that exhibit counter-memories which are often glossed over or overlooked in both African and Euro-American phallocentric official narratives. Whereas La Saison de l’ombre spotlights the Africans’ role in the process of slavery, Beloved highlights the tragedy of a maternal love in a context of bondage. Through a comparative approach, we have spotlighted the whole process of slavery, from the captivity in Africa to enslavement in America.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

Channelling the dead: A conversation on Desdemona with Tina Benko

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
York City ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Character Building

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.

scholarly journals Looking Like People; Feeling Like People: The Black Body, Dress and Aesthetic Therapy in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-872
Author(s):  
Marsha Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Therapeutic Discourse ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Instrumental Role

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.

scholarly journals Theorizing Black Power Movement in African American Literature: An Analysis of Morrison's Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol V (IV) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Fayaz Ahmad Kumar ◽  
Colette Morrow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Author

This paper analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement on the AfricanAmerican literary productions; especially in the fictional works of Toni Morrison. As an African-American author, Toni Morrison presents the idea of 'Africanness' in her novels. Morrison's fiction comments on the fluid bond amongst the African-American community, the Black Power and Black Aesthetics. The works of Morrison focus on various critical points in the history of African-Americans, her fiction recalls not only the memory of Africa but also contemplates the contemporary issues. Morrison situates the power politics within the framework of literature by presenting the history of the African-American cultures.

The African Diaspora

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
African Continent ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The One

In recent decades, research on the African diaspora has increasingly expanded from its established focus on the northern Atlantic to Latin America, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean world, and the African continent itself. This chapter discusses differing definitions of the diaspora, considers the role of pioneering scholars in early twentieth-century Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, and examines the debate between those who have stressed lines of cultural continuity between Africa and African American peoples, on the one hand, and those who have stressed cultural transformation or ‘creolization’ in the Americas, on the other. Recent research on African American religions has moved the field beyond the search for African origins by showing how the practitioners of these belief systems creatively and strategically imagined and reimagined ‘African’ ritual identities and Africa itself. Finally, the process of creolization in the African continent itself and in the Indian Ocean are considered.

The Tide of Preparation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Political Opportunities

This chapter shows how, during a period of limited political opportunities, in which African American activism was fraught with danger, Garveyites had built a massive political movement committed to modest aims at home, but premised on the notion that members were involved, in the words of a Garveyite from Tennessee, in a “world movement…which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe.” Here, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) takes center stage, Garveyites continued to nurture alliances across the African diaspora and throughout the “colored” world, and they continued to imagine their often mundane local politics against the backdrop of world anticolonialism. By framing their political aims internationally, and by projecting their radical demands for African liberation forward into an undefined future, Garveyites sustained vibrant local communities of political activism amidst the decline of the national UNIA and the constraints of Jim Crow America.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document