scholarly journals The Expression of Love in Long Distance Life (1989) by Marita Golden

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Diome FAYE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black American ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Family Living ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
So Long A Letter

In Long Distance Life (1989), Marita Golden, one of the most outstanding African American female writers, follows up her first novel,A Woman’s Place (1986) with an impressionistic sort of saga about a black American family living in Washington, D.C., from the 1920’s to the present. In Marita Golden’s Long Distance Life as in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (1979), most of the couples’s love lives come to an abrupt end by means of death, divorce or a presence of an intruder that is to say another lover between the two spouses. The question of love occupies a central role in the novel in so far as all most all the relationships of the characters are motivated by the issue of love. Women’s predicament in the novel is the outcome of the different aspects of love dealt with by Gloria Naylor.

scholarly journals Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
National Space ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Communal Healing

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national space— following Winthrop’s foundational ideology. As I will argue, the novel contends that the revamped concept of communal home and familial bonds —echoing Winthrop’s emblem of national belonging— recasts the trope of biblical refuge as a potential tenet to foster selfassertion and to rethink the limits of belonging and acceptance.

scholarly journals Gender Trouble and the Tragic Black Woman Hybrids in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 08
Author(s):  
Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novels ◽  
True Representation ◽  
Gender Pattern ◽  
Gender Trouble

<p>The African-American female character's description in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing are very impressive, among whom Clotel, Clare and Irene are depicted as one of the most important “passing” figures for the whole story. Though sharing some similarities with the traditional Black women in the past African-American novels, Clotel, Clare and Irene are very different. The strong connection with as well as variations than the usual gender pattern are mixed within these women. It is only by this new approach that the reader can re-think Black woman and build a new African-American female identity. Taking into the consideration an ecofeminist point of view, this paper is going to study the points of similarities with and differences from the traditional Black Women in the novel, unwrap on the developing subject identity of Black women in this novel, in order to prove that in this novel female subject identity is more than a true representation of essentialism and dualism, in a special and unique realistic perspective.</p>

Long-distance caregiving: A case study of an African-American family

2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 309-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanda Lott Collins ◽  
Tangerine A. Holt ◽  
Sharon E. Moore ◽  
Linda K. Bledsoe
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Family ◽  
American Family ◽  
Long Distance

scholarly journals Black Ghosts of the Diasporic Memory in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (11) ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Family ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The Family ◽  
Healing Processes

This article reads Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) as a novel that follows an African American family facing the ghosts of their past and present to resurrect buried stories that are unrelentingly interlocked with the legacy of slavery and the draconian racist practices of Jim Crow. I posit that the novel participates in the re-examination of the trope of the ghost as a healing asset that needs to be accommodated within the retrieval of memory work. Thus, the enactment of this African diasporic memory facilitates the encounter with their ghosts so that the family can start their healing processes and be provided with the tools and examples of how to keep on coming to terms together with and against the legacy of slavery and the present racist practices.

scholarly journals Rebekah Hyneman’s Leaves of the Upas Tree: A Tale of (In)temperance and (Im)morality

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Irina Rabinovich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Excessive Drinking ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Communal Support

AbstractThe intent of this paper is to examine the use, by nineteenth-century American authors, of the temperance novel, a popular literary sub-genre in antebellum America, as a literary means for presenting the widespread controversy in the nation as regards the achievements of temperance societies. Moreover, my goal is to show that the popularity of temperance novels, in spite of their didactic and moralistic nature, displays the public’s readiness to consume temperance literature, thus reciprocating the attempt of writers to promote social ideals and heal social ills. Finally, since Rebekah Hyneman, a convert to Judaism, is the only Jewish-American writer who wrote a temperance novel, and is one among a small number of female writers who used this genre, it is interesting to examine if and how her double “Otherness” (being a Jew and a female novelist) distinguishes her from her literary Christian male and/or female counterparts. Hyneman’s novel Leaves of the Upas Tree: A Story for Every Household (1854–55) serves as a case in point of a temperance novel that demonstrates how a dysfunctional American family operates as a microcosm and how temperance and other charitable societies fail to cope with individuals’ tribulations. More importantly, the novel aims to attest that a familial defective unit, affected by excessive drinking, breeds a ruthless societal macrocosm, lacking compassion, empathy, and social and communal support. The merciless, xenophobic and anti-Semitic community depicted in the novel serves as a prism through which the author presents much more acute plagues afflicting America.

scholarly journals “He Mought, en Den Again He Moughtent”: The Ambiguous Man in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Tuula Kolehmainen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
African American Male ◽  
First Impressions ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
European Education

In this article, I discuss Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, through the lens of a trickster tale on which the novel is loosely based. Tar Baby invites one to choose sides between Jadine, the African American female protagonist with a European education and worldviews, or Son, the bearer of a more traditional African American cultural heritage and values. Son is initially constructed as other, and his representation is based on negative stereotypical notions of the African American male. First impressions need to be revised later, as the text plays with the readers’ sympathies about Son. Even his survival is left open at the end of the novel and the range of options of how to categorize Son would seem to reflect the readers’ perceptions back on themselves. In this way, Morrison sets up a trap in which any reader making too easy or essentialist definitions of the character will fall. Thus, the most important expression of the trickster tale is the novel’s name: the novel itself is the tar baby. Moreover, the most important construction of tar lies in the ambiguous representation of Son.

scholarly journals Reading John Steinbeck’s “Flight” as a Folktale

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (12) ◽  
pp. 18-24
Author(s):  
Didier Arcade Ange LOUMBOUZI
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Mexican American Family ◽  
Family Living ◽  
Vladimir Propp

This paper analyses John Steinbeck’s “Flight,” a short story about the Torres, a Mexican American family, living on the periphery of Monterey in California and rarely going to town as it once happens to one of them, Pepé, who goes to buy supplies there. In addition to its one syllable word title and its twenty-six-page text, it is short like any short story in comparison with the novel which is another genre in spite of their common aspects. Its shortness clearly noticed does not end the debate on its form as it can also be compared with a folktale. The research question reads: to what extent can “Flight” be assimilated to a folktale? The aim is to show its characteristics of a Mexican American folktale. Concerning the approach, a reference is made to structuralism according to the theory on the form of the folktale developed by Vladimir Propp. In the end of this research, it is noticed that “Flight” is presented as a short story but it is formerly a folktale, a genre commonly linked to a given people identity, and Steinbeck uses it to express, to some extent, his compassion towards Mexican Americans marginalized within the Californian space.

scholarly journals Reunion with Self in Terry McMillan’s I Almost Forgot About You

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-91
Author(s):  
Pradip Nathuram Pawar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
The Family ◽  
Terry Mcmillan ◽  
Male Companion

The novel I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan, which deals with the problem of finding your own identity by studying the components of personality and the context in the formation of identity, is examined. African American feminist literature consists of common themes like sense of being different, managing multiple selves and quest for identity. Terry McMillans works represent African American female characters struggle for self-realization that help them in better understanding of the present and planning for the future by reestablishing their identity. The predicament of Georgia, protagonist of the novel, is that she has lost selfhood after subsequent divorces. In due course of time, her role in the family becomes diminished; also she loses interest in the professional life. Her aimlessness and strong desire to restore self leads her to search for male companion among her old boyfriends. She believes that self-satisfaction is possible with exploration of self for that she decides to go on a train trip and tries to focus on nurturing the hobby of woodwork. It helps her in regaining her internal and external self. Thus, the leitmotif of the novel is the search for your own identity as an attempt of inquiry for the destined future.

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