Linden Hills

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor marks psychological fragmentation which results into immense pain and suffering. Naylor, in this novel, addresses the physical and mental hierarchies which act as blockades in the higher purpose of human integration. This paper aims to investigate the saga of undiluted suffering in the lives of women in Linden Hills. The novelist shows in true colors how the black women become sacrificial lambs and receive the brunt of the frustration of the black males of their society. This paper is also a close study of black males mentality when they get unbridled power and exert it on all those who are subversive to them. Women become the easy victim of their ruthless power play. The tragedy is more intense because the women have been suffering for many generations. In every generation, Nedeed male marries a light-complexioned woman just to reduce her to a child-bearing tool. Failing that, the woman has to lead a life full of hardships and depravity. This paper analyses how her loud desires to stand against the institutionalized trauma herald a new era of freedom from pain and suffering.

Bridging Black Male and Female Standpoints through Autoethnographic Cultural Symbiosis in Gloria Naylor’s The Men of Brewster Place

The present paper argues that Gloria Naylor in The Men of Brewster Place (1998) spectacularly recreates, from a black female’s viewpoint, a solemn literary leeway for African American men’s narratives, and recommends an obligatory shufti to their hidden lives as to how the apparatuses of dominion objectify, suppress and marginalize African American men as well. These men have also been victimized, marginalized and objectified on the basis of their race, class and sexuality by the stereotypical mainstream power structure just like their female counterparts. Furthermore, the paper endeavours to scrutinize how it is unworkable to accomplish a genuine Black Feminist Standpoint without essentially appreciating Black Men’s Standpoint. Black men, who although are suppressors when it comes to their relationship with black females, simultaneously are also being suppressed beneath the tutelage of the mainstream hegemonistic-cum-stereotypical power system. As a sequel to Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (Naylor, 1983), The Men of Brewster Place attempts to autoethnographically lend some voice to her male characters, who complemented her female characters in the first novel.

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

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.

CONTINUITY OF AFROCENTRIC TROPES ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE NOVELS BY PAULE MARSHALL AND GLORIA NAYLOR

African American literature that is fundamentally a socially symbolic linguistic construct, seeks different ways to expand and continue the use of Afrocentric vernacular tropes of personal and collective identity formation. The five residual oral forms – oratory (including everyday speech acts), myth/ritual performance, legend, tale, and song – as well as satire, irony, and paradox are used by contemporary African American novelists. This paper points to how the legendary black ancestors and elder members of the community, the gifted and often rebellious orator, musician, artist, the spiritual leader, and the messianic figure are equally enduring symbols and tropes. The aim of this work is to show the way in which the contemporary African American novelists Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor use these (above mentioned) characters and symbols to reconstruct their long struggle as individuals and as community against anti-black racism. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on continuity of Afrocentric tropes in African American personal/collective and female/male identity formation as represented in selected novels by Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor.

The Footprints of Ghosts: Fictional Folklorists in the Work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead

This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.

Invisible Ball of Dreams

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when they consider the story of race and racism in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing, if underdocumented, staple of African American communities. This book examines creative portraits of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Divided into three literary waves, the book is especially attentive to the archival contributions (and at times drawbacks) of imaginative representations of black baseball. Specifically, the book argues that African American and Euro-American novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fill in gaps and silences in recorded baseball history; democratize access to archives by sharing their research with readers; and advance countermythologies to whitewashed baseball lore. Reading representations across the literary color line also opens up a propitious space for exploring black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Thus, while this book’s particular focus is black baseball, the comparative, archival mode of analysis utilized herein provides a model for analyzing literary interventions in other marginalized cultural histories as well.

“Let’s Play Two”: The Affective Resonances of Black Baseball in African American Poetry

As with August Wilson and Gloria Naylor (chapter 3), chapter 4’s poets—Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael S. Harper, Quincy Troupe, and Harmony Holiday—view black baseball as a vehicle for exposing racial degradation on the one hand and maintaining collective pride on the other. While they hold distinct vantage points and Holiday is of a younger, post-Civil Rights generation, these poets are all invested in shedding light on the paradoxical emotions educed by the memory of black baseball, illuminating what it felt like to be systematically excluded from the national pastime and, ultimately, mainstream civic life. In the process, Komunyakaa, Harper, Troupe, and Holiday continue to mine and enrich an “archive of feelings,” which includes the resonances and ephemera that are not housed within museums or captured in statistical records but are nonetheless vital resources for reconstructing the interior lives of marginalized people.

Bildungsroman Hermeneutics in the Post–Civil Rights Era

This essay defines the problem of bildungsroman hermeneutics for literary criticism and social policy in the post–civil rights era. Examining critical responses to Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, it argues that the traditional bildungsroman exerts a powerful hold on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros’s text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects with neoconservative arguments that helped to roll back civil rights reforms and stymie government interventions. To address the inequalities enduring after civil rights we must circumvent an individual-centered template that has shaped plots of narrative and social change. Part of a broader effort to decenter the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros’s text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise.