Black feminist Criticism

March 2009

Liu ying

Bell hooks: Black women and feminism

• The black woman remained an absence from woman-centred thinking.

• The totalising gestures of feminism which seek to speak for all women disguise differences between women.

Barbara Smith: toward a Black feminist criticism

• Published in 1977, path-breaking essay

• No ready-made great traditions of Black women’s writing that is published

• Racism and sexism

• Alice walker: In search of our mother’s gardens: forging black women writing tradition

• Zora Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker: common themes, common approaches

Beloved

• Beloved makes brutally clear that aside from the “equality of oppression” that black men and women suffered, black women were also oppressed as women.

• As Morrison’s novel shows, physical abuse is humiliating, but the added emotional pain of a mother is devastating.

• Morrison also portrays the mother’s deed as a heroic act of resistance, one among many that constituted the quotidian experience of slaves.

Narrative technique

• Charting the journey back from the free present to the salve past, Beloved reverses the progressive movement of the salve narrative.

• Further, while the salve narrative privileged the individual’s account of coming to selfhood, Morrison’s narrative presents a multiplicity of voices, particularly women.