Understanding Alice Walker

Thadious M. Davis

Description

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations.

Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.

Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Discrimination
• Alice Walker
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Susannah
• American
• The Women
• Poetry
• African American
• Black people
• Social sciences
• Slavery
• Writing
• Woman
• Literary criticism
• Ideology
• Story within a story
• Career
• Sexual identity
• Buchi Emecheta
• Jayne Cortez
• Prerogative
• Elechi Amadi
• América
• Los ambiciosos
• Women
• Women Authors

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 20 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781643362397
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING ALICE WALKER
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Also of Interest
Understanding Colson Whitehead , Derek C. Maus
Understanding David Foster Wallace , Marshall Boswell
Understanding James Baldwin , Marc Dudley
Understanding Jennifer Egan , Alexander Moran
Understanding John Edgar Wideman , Quentin D. Miller
Understanding John Rechy , Mar a DeGuzm n
Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita , Jolie Scheffer
Understanding Randall Kenan , James A. Crank
Understanding Stewart O Nan , Heike Paul
Understanding William S. Burroughs , Gerald Alva Miller, Jr.
UNDERSTANDING
ALICE WALKER
Thadious M. Davis
2021 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.uscpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-64336-237-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-64336-238-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64336-239-7 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Scott Campbell
www.scottcampbellphoto.com
In memory of my mother Helen, who always laughed, and my gift Hatim, who always loved.
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family
Chapter 2
The Sight of the Familiar: I Love Myself
Chapter 3
The Work of the Woman: Coloring Purple
Chapter 4
The World of the Word: Mediating Self
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for both students and good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century, Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book required reading again Alice Walker s earliest work, especially Once , and following through to her latest meditations, all the while embarking on an exercise in remembering my own path as a daughter of the South moving out of that South, a perpetual nomad, a Fulani heart. I remember the mentors showing the way: Blyden Jackson and Richard Barksdale, teacher-scholars; and Pinkie Gordon Lane and Arthenia Bates Millican, creative writers. I remember with gratitude: the models-Emily Dalgarno, Millicent Bell, Adelaide Cromwell, Sam Allen; the poetic guides-David Eberly, Rick Shaner, Connie Veenendaal; the friends-Nellie McKay, Marilyn Richardson, Fahamisha Shariat, Claudia Tate; the fellow-travelers-Michael Harper, Aishah Rahman, Dorothy Denniston, Barton St. Armand; and the bonding sisters-Gamma Sigma Sigmas and Delta Sigma Thetas.
I thank Alice Walker for her writings and travels, and for this gift of my remembering all those who once made a difference in my path. Although so many have now passed on, they all continue to radiate light and ignite laughter to mark my journeying.
My sincere thanks to Linda Wagner-Martin, prodigious scholar and incomparable editor, who asked me to write this book and never gave up on my getting around to it, and to Simba and Pushkin, my almost indomitable last boys, who tried their best to see me finish it.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Alice Walker
The Sign of the Family
Mommy, there s a world in your eye. Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?
-Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self (1983)
Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, has been publishing poetry, fiction, and essays since the 1960s. Throughout her long career and from multiple ideological and spatial locations, she has committed to writing narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition. In the process, she has demonstrated the aesthetic and political power of the word. Her art has turned increasingly to a pronounced spirituality that combines her inherently activist stance with an encompassing global vision of goodness and peace. Her unwavering attention to feminist causes, to anti-war discourses, to environmental issues, and to human rights struggles within the United States and around the world has infused her art with passion. It has also marked her work as constantly evolving, transforming itself and refusing to remain situated within any narrowly defined racial or ideological location. That very passion for standing up for causes she understands as ethical and just has often proven to be controversial, particularly in the politically contentious twenty-first century. Over the past fifty years and despite setbacks and obstacles, personal and professional, Alice Walker has persisted in writing poetry and fiction, along with autobiography, criticism, and meditative and political essays. Hers is a remarkable achievement well worth reconsidering for a twenty-first-century audience.
Walker is, arguably, the premiere African American Southern author of her generation, those writers born in the period of World War II and coming of age in the 1960s. The apex of her critical reception was the publication of The Color Purple (1982), winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In more recent years, she has privileged poetry along with nonfiction prose, publishing both frequently and primarily in small volumes addressing critical issues in a changing world. Her global politics, her taking on issues of political prisoners in many nations, her expressing outrage at the continuation of female genital mutilation, or another issue of pressing moral significance, sometimes obscures how her upbringing as a child in the rural, segregated South of specific social mores, racial culture, and political histories has influenced her work. She has steadily drawn upon her formative experiences to enlighten and empower her understanding of the wider world in which she now moves.
Walker s introverted, serious inspection of the interior of hearts and minds from her now-transnational and expansive worldview developed out of the emblematic and transformative aspects of her early life that have shaped her specific way of being in the world. What distinguishes her prolific artistic production is her way of seeing herself and her world. While Alice Walker has not been a subject within Disabilities Studies, her injury as a child, causing the loss of sight in an eye and a visible scarring, suggests that she could well be. Her writing underscores her attention to debilitating injury, inner vision, and spiritual awareness that attends to the wounded, the lost, the oppressed, the dismissed, the maligned, and the invisible.
Alice Malsenior Walker came into the world on February 9, 1944, the last child in a large Southern Black family. 1 As the youngest of Minnie Tallulah ( Lou ) and Willie Lee Walker s eight children, Walker had siblings who were already adults and living away from home during her childhood. The oldest of her five brothers, Willie Fred, born in 1930, was the most unlike his father and brothers (William Henry, born 1934; James Thomas, born 1935; Robert Louis, born 1940; and Curtis Ulysses, born 1942) who observed a strict sense of masculine behavior and dominance. Her bothers Robert and Curtis were closer in age to Alice than her two sisters (Minnie Lee, born 1932; and Annie Ruth, born 1937); as a result, they became playmates for the tomboy Alice. The siblings, like their hardworking sharecropper parents and several generations of the family in Putnam County and Eatonton, Georgia, attended Wards Chapel, an African Methodist Episcopal church still in existence today.
Walker s childhood home in rural Georgia was where she experienced mid-twentieth-century Southern life still closely linked to segregation and the social reality of the past. Sharecropping defined the economic condition of her material world, just as legal segregation and its sanctioned customs under Jim Crow delimited her social world. As a child of field workers dependent upon the vicissitudes of crops, Walker spent her youth in poverty. Even with a good harvest, her father earned under $300 a year, and her mother s efforts to supplement the income with domest