African American Women Writers

The aim of the research is to explicate the importance of understanding bio-centric equality in the process of Self-realization. It focuses on how the 17 th century Western concept of Selfrealization, through the process of individuation emphasizing human beings as separate entities, detached from other human and non-human aspects, has induced a selfish nature. Alice Walker's famous novel The Color Purple has been chosen to explore the importance of an alternate reality of a biophilic narrative with regards to the process of Self-realization. Rosemary Radford Ruether's concepts of "Gaia" and the "Human Consciousness and Altruism" are employed on the text by Alice Walker.

If we suppose, with Kant, that "laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing,"  and that our expectations and what reduces them are, to some extent, culturally constructed, we must come to the conclusion that the evocation of laughter by a joke or absurdity or some other 'reduction to nothing' has a range of communities in which it will work better or worse, or may fail to work.  In Ann Petry's comic masterpiece, "The Bones of Louella Brown,"  a reader begins to hear the joyful and loving laughter of the community of saints.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.

This paper aims to highlight the similarities between the condition of the African-American woman and that of the Egyptian woman. As a result, this proves that in order to empower Egyptian women to solve their problems of oppression and inequality, they cannot do with Feminism (which is a movement that is dominated by white women and not inclusive of women of color who incidentally face much harsher socio-economic conditions) but rather Womanism, which is a term coined by Alice Walker to be a more inclusive type of Feminism. This is proven through examining four short stories by two female writers: African-American writer Alice Walker (“Roselily” and “How Did I Get Away With Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.”) and Egyptian writer Salwa Bakr (“Kol Hatha Al Sawt Al Gameel Allathi Ya’ti Min Dakhiliha” or “This Beautiful Voice Coming from Within Her” and “Thaat Al Gholaf Al Aswad” or “She Who is Wrapped in Black”) through a Womanist perspective. Some of the works in choice have been tackled in numerous studies, however, not in comparison to each other, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge. After examining the stories and comparing them it was concluded that African-American and Egyptian women have quite similar struggles (namely: poverty, inequality, and the oppression of patriarchy while being the primary supporters of their families). As a result –and since Feminism has proven not to be as inclusive as it should be of the issues of women of color—Womanism has proven to be the answer to their problems.

Angelou presents these significant scenes from her life in order to counter the dominant white view of black life and black people.  While facing the constant oppression of white society, Angelou’s book is populated with people who refuse to allow their lives to become the sum of white oppression.  In addition, I will argue that this is a political text because Angelou presents this oppression not as her individual experience, but one of systemic racism and sexism.  As she is telling her story, she is also telling her people’s story, including the often written-out story of black women.

This research paper deals with Postmodern American novel White Noise written by
Don DeLillo. White Noise explores the theme of death as well as postmodern life style, which
is characterized by mass consumerism, developed technology and extended media.
This research investigates whether the characters in the novel are caught between
postmodern life style and death as a theme, and how do they respond to these two completely
different conditions. The significance of this study lies in its demonstration of people
struggling to find meaning in a world that does not offer the old assurances of faith or science,
as well as in its demonstration of the continuity of the theme of death in postmodern literature.
This research paper is divided into three chapters: chapter one includes an overview of
the novel, a description of the 1980s America and a brief description of the theme of death in
literature. Chapter two includes the main postmodern life style aspects included in White
Noise and the relationship of the characters to them. Chapter three contains a description of
the theme of death in the novel and the response of the characters to it.
To conduct this study two methods and one approach are used: the descriptive method
is used to describe America in the 1980s, and the main treatments of the theme of death in
literature. The historical approach to literary criticism is used to analyze White Noise in its
cultural and social context. The psychological method is used to analyze the characters’
reactions and responses to their postmodern life style and to the theme of death.
After analysis of the novel, the characters are found to be caught between postmodern
way of life, which is informed by consumerism, technology and media, and death.

Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black

Vicky Chaparyan
Lebanese University

Abstract
Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community.  As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of self-determination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language.  Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about  her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through comparing the Maternity symbolic order in Morrison to the Paternity symbolic order in Jacque Lacan’s The Psychoses (1955-1956). 

Key words: Beloved, slavery, Maternity symbolic order, Paternity symbolic order, J. Lacan, unspeakable thoughts, language, ghost, story of trauma.

In this literary work,Alaa Alsaady addresses themes of Integration and Miscegenation for the African-Americans in the United States during a very critical era of the twentieth century.The Civil Rights Era spans roughly from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, and it was a time of social, political,cultural and economic change in South Africa and the United States.Alice Childress’s plays discussed herewith are Trouble in Mind 1955,Wedding Band 1966 and Wine in the Wilderness 1969 are vital reflections for the struggle of African Americans during that period.Each play of these plays presents a story of struggle with a modern type that mimics the human needs for achieving better life aspirations.Alaa Alsaady tries to present a picture of the old and new,black and white, males and females,poor and rich for characters portrayed earlier by Alice Childress as real humans with ups and downs,yet Alsaady introduces them here as reflections for the earlier images and echoes of those simple black folks inetgrated with their white peers and still are felt by the reader as authentic people of every time.Readers will find this book as up to date in content,modern in subject and very interesting.

Frances Joseph-Gaudet (1861?-1934) was an African American social activist, prison reformer, educator, and temperance campaigner.  She served as a voluntary social worker in New Orleans city jails and later established the Colored Industrial Home and School to serve at-risk African American children.  Her autobiography, He Leadeth Me (1913), remains the primary extant documentation of her life.  This paper recovers unknown biographical details and contextualizes Joseph-Gaudet within Progressive era and African American reform movements.  It discusses the trajectory in which Joseph-Gaudet moved from work in jails and courts to a juvenile reform enterprise, an anti-prison effort that attempted to staunch the flow of African American youth into Louisiana prisons.  We conclude with consideration of the near-absence of slavery from Joseph-Gaudet’s narrative and the role of evangelical Christianity in shaping her anti-prison activism and concept of communal salvation.

In JAZZ, Toni Morrison identifies and explores the mechanisms by which Black people have been able to re-make themselves again and again on the site of exile--in the American South, in the American North, and elsewhere in the "New World."  This essay examines the philosophy of form, the improvisation of possibilities, the sounding of transformation, and finally, the re-sounding of purpose, in JAZZ.  Specifically, it traces Morrison's exploration of the philosophical and epistemological potential of a diverse range of African diaspora expressive arts, all informed by the principles of improvisation and "truth in timbre" that perhaps achieve their greatest articulation in jazz.  It demonstrates that through this exploration Morrison reveals how these expressive arts have functioned as a mode and institution of intervention and, therefore, as a blueprint and resource for re-creating a whole self.

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.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel in which the black female slave Hannah Crafts aims at the remodeling of her society and to gain self–assertion through a deeply Christian commitment and a total and honest respect to the values it impinges drawing broadly on the Bible and reshaping biblical imagery to convey her message and to submit her subjectivity and her Americanness. By using the national continuum of jeremiad rhetoric and her attachment to the values of the Christian creed, the novel partakes and yet takes a different direction from slave narratives by cagily forerunning Du Bois’s praised theory of the double consciousness. In so doing, it positions its protagonist as the first black female that absorbs and displays an identity that eventually becomes successful for it installs herself within the realm of home premised on the longed Puritan myth of the (African) American City upon a Hill which allows her to be a proper (African) American citizen.

A review of the digital theatre festival on the work of Adrienne Kennedy, understudied in relation to the American Black Arts Movement and aligned with the Theatre of the Absurd in the USA. Her work has been drastically underreprested on American stages.

Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community. As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of selfdetermination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language. Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through...

This encyclopedia entry reviews the history of African American Women's autobiographical writings that include early nineteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives as well as other politically and socially informed critiques of American society's patriarchy and racism.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) stands in the tradition of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. The novel discloses Hurston’s mastering of the aesthetics that black folklore infused to the African American cultural experience and her accommodation to bring to the fore the needed voice of black women. Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest, the novel extends its jeremiadic ethos and evolves into a black feminist manifesto in which a world without women equates disruption and instability. Hurston showcases the importance of an inclusive and ethic sacred femininity to reclaim a new type of womanhood both socially and aesthetically. Three decades before the post-colonial era, Hurston’s bold representation of the sacred femininity recasts the jeremiad tradition to pin down notions of humanitarianism, social justice and the recognition of politics of art. All in all, in an era of a manly social protest literature Hurston opts for portraying the folkloric aesthetics of spirituality as creative agency simply to acknowledge the leadership of the sacred femininity that black women could remodel into art.

... of inheritance and heritage" through fictional depictions of mixed-race characters, racial intermarriage, and passing was Pauline Hopkins (Carby 162 ... There he is recog-nized as Ethiopian royalty, despite his apparent whiteness, and weds a black queen, Candace, leaving only ...

Signifying upon European texts in search of a new definition of what it means to be black in North America the plays Harlem Duet (1997) by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and Desdemona (2012) by Toni Morrison make for interesting reading in the modern-day study of (black) identity establishment within US and Canadian contexts for, by revising Shakespeare’s Othello, they rethink and rewrite a social and racial reality unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity. Sears’ play establishes a specific reading of Canadiannes in dialogue with African America to erect a possibility of healing and inclusion offering a feminist vision of the black self. Similarly, Morrison banks on the voice of Africa within the US to conclude Sears’ account of a feminist and transnational subjectivity for blacks in North America. In so doing, both plays readjust the Shakespearean story to render a feminist, transnational, cosmopolitan and yet democratic definition of the black self.