Suchergebnisse

Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly, states historiographer Patricia Morton who exposes profoundly dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarship as it has attempted to render the history of the Afro-American woman. Focusing on the scholarly literature of fact rather than on fictional or popular portrayals, Disfigured Images explores the telling--and frequent mis-telling--of the story of black women during a century of American historiography beginning in the late 19th century and extending to the present. Morton finds that during this period, a large bo

In this article, bell books' ground-breaking black feminist approach is adopted to examine the lingering impact of slave trade of Afro-American women in contemporary America. Slavery in the past stigmatized the present lives of Afro-American women. Even though slavery was abolished, the terrible effects of the slave trade continue to demean, degrade, and caricature black women in the western world of today. hooks' radical black feminist ideas reveal how racial discrimination and sexual orientation towards black women rob them of their social identity and place in white supremacist society. This research critiques all the forms of dehumanization black women experience in the white world starting with historical enslavement and ending in the present dehumanization. In the white media, theatre, music, literature, and other disciplines, black women are presented as sexy, bold, aggressive, hypersexual, angry, impatient, violent, macho, insensitive, incompetent, and lazy. The contemporary lives of Afro-American women are being plagued by the effects of the slave trade in the white world.

Asks on whose behalf the black woman poet in the USA speaks, what type of language she uses and what audience she has. Points out that an earlier lack of tradition meant that originally white styles of language were used and aimed at the white audience. Looks at the rise of the blues era and the "blueswoman". Considers the work of Phillis Wheatley, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Anne Spencer and Angelina Grimke together with Margaret Walker and singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Finally, outlines the development of a political era and the growing sexual freedom of black women and the impact their writings.

This article, evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the ecofeminist tenets upon the environmental fiction of Erdrich and Morrison, creates a new understanding of the preservation of the environment for engendering a more egalitarian relationship between humanity and nature. It presents the critique of the ways Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich engage with the environmental themes and motifs using the historical connections of their communities with nature as a reference point via eco-performative texts. The overall scheme of the article, therefore, denies the anthropocentric approach upheld by the Euro-American world towards the environment and glorifies the biocentric approach revered and celebrated by the Native American and AfroAmerican lifestyle, emphasizing that in the cosmic scheme of nature, not just humans but non-humans, nature and environment are equal partners. The study concludes that Morrison and Erdrich have stressed in their fiction the ecocritical recognition of the inevitable interdependence of man and nature. Their fiction asserts that considering environmental issues to be human issues can positively affect the human attitude towards nature/environment.

This research article is an attempt to evaluate the Native and Afro American women writers 'sustained efforts to articulate a continuous and internal cultural female identity by constructing re evaluative narratives that deconstruct institutionally supported universal female images inflicted upon the third and fourth world women by the first world feminist intelligentsia. To do so these women writers radically depart from the conventions of Euro American stylistic, formal and structural modalities of the narrative and use instead a stylistic mosaic allowing the native and black oral traditions to imbricate with the white normative models. Since literature and arts have always been an effective medium, an expansive domain, and a discursive field where writers have been voicing the aureate human feelings, conflicting passions and the continuous struggles of the different societal segments, especially of deprived strata against those who maintain and perpetuate their cultural and political hegemony by suppressing the subalterns, the women writers from the fourth world ethnic communities have expressed whole range of the intensely personal and communal human emotions that radiate from the springboard of social, cultural, historic and political practices One of the significant features that the Native American and Afro American women writers often demonstrate include the use of magical realist strategies that express, on one hand, their efforts to indigenize narrative and, on the other hand, help them construct female identity from their own perspective since, within main concerns of contemporary fourth world feminist criticism, the (re) construction of female identity merits special attention and analysis. The stereotypical discursive construction of the Native and Afro American women by the dominant Euro American discourses bracketed them into essentialist categories glossing over the medley of vital differences that these women reveal in their social, cultural, anthropological and sexual strictures. Tackling the issue of the discursive construction of female identity that involves conceptual and perspectival problems, both Native American and Afro American women writers deconstruct the sweeping generalization of the fourth world women by challenging and subverting the clichéd images replacing them with empowered and agentive subjects who are no more subjected to, what Gyatri Spivk conceptualizes, subalternity and "epistemic violence".

This hitherto unpublished essay by W. E. B. Du Bois, the text titled "The Afro-American," which likely dates to the late autumn of 1894 or the winter of 1895, is an early attempt by the young scholar to define for himself the contours of the situation of the Negro, or "Afro-American," in the United States in the mid-1890s. It is perhaps the earliest full text expressing his nascent formulations of both the global "problem of the color-line" and the sense of "double-consciousness" among African Americans in North America.