Possessing the secret of black womanhood : reading African women in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, The Color Purple, and Warrior Marks
type: CreativeWork
description: Speaking for or about others has featured consistently in current feminist debates as it is becoming clear that the assumed homogeneity of women within social groups is not realistic. It has become clear that difference can no longer be analysed in terms of race, gender and sexuality alone. Other factors such as history, nationality, and culture demand more attention than they have been previously accorded, which makes many alliances across national boundaries subject to redefinition and reconceptualisation. This thesis looks at the attendant dangers of ignoring the differences within alliances based on race and gender. I analyse Alice Walker's representation of African women and female circumcision in her novels Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Color Purple and her documentary film Warrior Marks and its accompanying book of the same name the text, to argue that when national and cultural differences are sacrificed for sisterhood and solidarity based on a superficial universalisation of racial and gender oppression, the totalising, discursive tendencies that many critics objected to in second wave mainstream feminism are replicated. Walker differentiates between African women as objects of her discourse and the Western women as its audience. In her representation of Africa and Africans, particularly African women, she is not self-reflexive enough to explore the impact of her ideological location in the West on her identity. Thus, she does not create enough distance between her cultural and ideological upbringing to be able to escape the charge of ethnocentrism. Because she reads African women from her location in American culture, her work is best read within the African American literature on Africa and Africans dating back three centuries. That the sisterhood that Walker's work advances between African American and African women is informed by unequal power relations between the West and Third World is made clear by her deployment of her womanist ethic in two …
abstract: Speaking for or about others has featured consistently in current feminist debates as it is becoming clear that the assumed homogeneity of women within social groups is not realistic. It has become clear that difference can no longer be analysed in terms of race, gender and sexuality alone. Other factors such as history, nationality, and culture demand more attention than they have been previously accorded, which makes many alliances across national boundaries subject to redefinition and reconceptualisation. This thesis looks at the attendant dangers of ignoring the differences within alliances based on race and gender. I analyse Alice Walker's representation of African women and female circumcision in her novels Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Color Purple and her documentary film Warrior Marks and its accompanying book of the same name the text, to argue that when national and cultural differences are sacrificed for sisterhood and solidarity based on a superficial universalisation of racial and gender oppression, the totalising, discursive tendencies that many critics objected to in second wave mainstream feminism are replicated. Walker differentiates between African women as objects of her discourse and the Western women as its audience. In her representation of Africa and Africans, particularly African women, she is not self-reflexive enough to explore the impact of her ideological location in the West on her identity. Thus, she does not create enough distance between her cultural and ideological upbringing to be able to escape the charge of ethnocentrism. Because she reads African women from her location in American culture, her work is best read within the African American literature on Africa and Africans dating back three centuries. That the sisterhood that Walker's work advances between African American and African women is informed by unequal power relations between the West and Third World is made clear by her deployment of her womanist ethic in two …
author: Nako, Nontsasa
language: eng
date published: 2004
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:47Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of English Language and Literature

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6747